The Press Release Isn't Dead: Most Writers Are Just Doing It Wrong

If you're the person at your company who writes press releases but didn't come up as a PR professional, this is for you. You're probably doing it because it landed on your desk. Maybe you're the head of marketing at a 40-person company and press releases are one of the twenty things you own. Maybe you're a founder who knows the company is moving faster than the market realizes and you're trying to close that gap yourself. Either way, you're not starting from a blank page by choice. And the three mistakes that get most releases ignored are not about writing quality. They're structural. Fix the structure, and the rest gets significantly easier. Mistake #1: The Buried Lede (The Blank Page Problem) The most common version of this mistake: you spend two paragraphs on company background before telling anyone what actually happened. This is backwards, and it happens because most people start writing from the beginning instead of from the news. Journalists read like surgeons: fast, looking for the thing that matters. If your most newsworthy fact is in paragraph three, you've already lost them. The lede belongs in sentence one. What a lede looks like: "Fintech startup Meridian today raised $12M to eliminate bank wire fees for small businesses, its third funding round in 18 months." That's a lede. "Founded in 2021, Meridian is a San Francisco-based fintech company committed to innovation in financial services..." That's a burial. If you're staring at a blank page wondering where to start, start with the news in one sentence. The rest of the release exists to support that sentence. Mistake #2: The Generic Executive Quote (The Founder Voice Problem) Pick any press release at random. The CEO quote will say something like: "We're thrilled to announce this exciting milestone as we continue our mission to transform the industry." Every single word of that sentence is useless. It adds nothing a journalist can quote, and it signals that nobody with an actual opinion wrote it. This is especially common in founder-written releases. You're close to the work. The quote ends up sounding self-important or vague because you're trying to represent the company rather than say what you actually think. The fix: Write the quote last. Ask what you'd actually say if a journalist called right now and asked why this announcement matters. If the quote sounds like something generated from a template, rewrite it until it sounds like a person with an opinion. Mistake #3: Zero SEO Architecture (The Disappearing Announcement Problem) Even if a journalist never picks up your story, a well-structured press release can rank in search results for weeks. Most releases throw this away entirely: no subheadings, no keyword intent, no structure. Press releases published with proper heading structure do better in both traditional search and AI-powered search tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT. Your announcement doesn't have to disappear after launch day. A well-built release keeps working. What well-structured looks like: A focused headline with the core newsworthy claim. A first paragraph that answers who, what, when, where. Quotes that add to, not repeat, the body content. A boilerplate that describes the company as it exists today. The One-Paragraph Test Before you send any release, read only the first paragraph. Ask yourself: if a journalist read only this paragraph, would they understand what happened and why it matters to their readers? If the answer is no, your lede is buried. Fix that first. Everything else is secondary. The press release format isn't the problem. The execution almost always is. Start your first press release on 24HRPR. Structured prompts that eliminate the blank page: lede, quotes, boilerplate, all in the order journalists expect. Start your first release free.