Press releases: still useful, often misused

A press release announces something to the media in a structured format. The reason people call them dead is that most are non-news — self-congratulatory announcements no journalist's readers care about — which get ignored. But a release built around genuine news still earns coverage.

The key is newsworthiness and targeting: journalists cover what interests their audience, not what a company wants to publicise. Used for real news, sent to the right journalists, and written to make their job easy, press releases remain a useful tool — just not a magic one.

Why this matters for your brand

Press releases occupy a strange place in marketing: constantly declared dead, yet still used everywhere, and the truth is that both the criticism and the continued use are justified — for different reasons. The criticism is deserved because the vast majority of press releases genuinely don't work, and they don't work for an obvious reason once you see it: they aren't news. A typical press release is a company announcing something the company finds important — a new hire, a minor product update, a partnership, an award — written in self-congratulatory corporate language and blasted to as many journalists as possible. But journalists don't cover what a company wants publicised; they cover what their readers care about, and a routine corporate announcement fails that test completely. So it gets ignored, the business concludes press releases are useless, and the 'press releases are dead' refrain gets repeated. The tool didn't fail; it was pointed at the wrong target.

Used correctly, though, a press release remains a genuinely useful instrument, because it does something valuable: it packages news in a format journalists can quickly understand and act on. The difference between a release that earns coverage and one that gets deleted comes down to a few principles that most senders ignore. First and most important is newsworthiness — the release has to contain something a journalist's audience would actually find interesting: real news, original data, a genuine development, a timely and relevant angle. If there's no news, no amount of polish will save it. Second is targeting — a relevant release sent to the specific journalists who cover that beat, with an understanding of what their audience cares about, vastly outperforms the same release blasted indiscriminately to hundreds of inboxes. Third is craft — a clear, well-structured release that hands the journalist a ready-to-use story, with the key facts, context, and quotes they need, respects their time and makes coverage easy. The businesses that treat press releases as a way to distribute genuine news to the right people, written to make journalists' jobs easier, still earn real coverage from them. The ones that treat them as a way to broadcast non-events to everyone keep proving to themselves that press releases don't work — when the real problem is that they never had a story worth telling in the first place.

Sources

1. Search Engine Journal
2. Demand Metric

Figures are drawn from the third-party sources cited above and were cross-checked against them. They reflect industry-wide research and estimates — not guarantees of specific outcomes — and some are indicative industry figures rather than exact measurements.