What Is a Press Release?

Release here means handing something over for publication: the text is released to the press. Etymonline dates the phrase press release to at least 1918.

The best-known account of the format's origin begins with the Atlantic City train wreck in New Jersey on October 28, 1906, which killed 53 people according to the next day's papers. According to the Museum of Public Relations in New York, Ivy Lee, an adviser to the Pennsylvania Railroad, persuaded the company to give reporters its own statement, and The New York Times printed it unchanged on October 30, which is why it is often called the first modern press release. Associated Press reports carried by two South Carolina newspapers on October 31 tell it differently: the railroad's general manager, W. W. Atterbury, declined to make any statement until the investigation was complete.

• 1906. The Atlantic City wreck and the Pennsylvania Railroad statement credited to Ivy Lee.
• 1954. On March 8, according to the company, PR Newswire sends the first electronic corporate news release to 12 New York media outlets.
• 1961. On October 2, Lorry Lokey founds Business Wire in San Francisco, opening with 16 media outlets and seven clients.
• 1989. Carl-Eduard Meyer founds news aktuell, the German distribution service behind ots and Presseportal, which the German news agency dpa buys in 1994.
• 2006. Journalist Tom Foremski publishes "Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!", calling for releases to be broken into tagged components, and SHIFT Communications, by its own account, starts on the social media press release around the same time.
• 2010. AMEC, the international association for communication measurement, adopts the Barcelona Principles, which reject advertising value equivalency as a measure. New versions follow in 2015 and 2020.

A press release is read from the top down, and each block has a job:

• Embargo, if there is one: a line giving the date and time before which the release must not be published. Journalists get the news early and have time to prepare.
• Headline: the news in one sentence, with the organization's name and a concrete fact.
• Subhead or key points: two or three sentences or bullets for readers who stop there.
• Dateline: the city and date at the start of the first paragraph.
• Lead: the first paragraph answers who, what, when, where, why and how.
• Body: the details, from most to least important, following the inverted pyramid. If an editor cuts from the bottom, the least important part goes.
• Quote: one or two sentences from a named person with a title, ready to be used in quotation marks.
• Boilerplate: a fixed closing paragraph on what the organization does.
• Media contact: name, email and phone, plus a link to the press room with images.
• End mark: US releases sometimes close with "###" or "-30-".

Listed companies may add a forward-looking statements section to limit liability for forecasts, as Pfizer and BioNTech do in the example below.

Source: own compilation based on the examples in this entry.

A real example from the US: Apple's release of January 9, 2007 introducing the iPhone, still on Apple's newsroom.

Source: Apple Newsroom, accessed 07.11.2026.

The contact block and boilerplate shown are those of the current newsroom page and may differ from the 2007 version. A second example with every block, including forward-looking statements and two boilerplates, is the joint release by Pfizer and BioNTech of November 9, 2020 on the first interim analysis of their COVID-19 vaccine, whose English version was filed with the SEC as an exhibit.

Template with no real company, for reuse:

• Headline: Bakery chain opens first store in Austin, creating 12 jobs.
• Dateline: AUSTIN, Texas, March 3, 2027.
• Lead: The bakery chain opens its first store outside Dallas on Monday on Congress Avenue, with 12 employees hired locally.
• Body: opening hours, investment, plans for more stores, where the flour comes from.
• Quote: the CEO explains why the company chose Austin.
• Boilerplate: year founded, number of stores and employees.
• Media contact: name, email and phone; link to photos cleared for use.

Source: own compilation.

The metric no longer recommended is advertising value equivalency (AVE), which calculates what the same space would have cost as an ad. AMEC's Barcelona Principles have rejected it since 2010, and the 2020 version calls it a flawed measure. Instead they ask for the quality of coverage to be assessed, negative results included.

Source: own assessment.

Whether journalists still use press releases has mainly been surveyed by companies in the industry. Cision, which sells distribution and media monitoring, asked more than 3,000 journalists in 19 markets in 2025, and 72% called the press release the most useful resource PR teams can offer. A 2018 survey of more than 500 journalists by Muck Rack and Zeno Group, reported by PR Daily, found that 53% in the US and 41% elsewhere did not use press releases to find new story ideas, and only 3% relied on them heavily.

Source: own compilation.

Source: the services' websites, accessed 07.11.2026; no ranking, countries in the order of this entry. Google's rule applies to every route: links with optimized anchor text in press releases distributed on other sites count as link spam.

Part of what the media publish comes from press releases with little change. For a study published in 2008, Justin Lewis, Andrew Williams and Bob Franklin analyzed 2,207 items from five British newspapers and 402 broadcast reports from two weeks in 2006 and found extensive reliance on PR material and agency copy.

In 2006 Tom Foremski wrote that press releases were nearly useless, created by committees and edited by lawyers. He proposed breaking the release into tagged components that each outlet could assemble itself.

For SEO, the press release is not a link source. Google counts links with optimized anchor text in press releases distributed on other sites as link spam, and asks for paid links to be marked rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". What a release can do is carry news that other outlets cover and link to on their own.

AI adds a further risk: a release is quick to draft, but a wrong figure or a quote nobody said reaches newsrooms just the same. The sender is responsible for what the release says.

In the US, Regulation FD requires a public company that discloses material nonpublic information to certain market professionals or shareholders to make it public simultaneously if the disclosure is intentional and promptly if it is not (17 CFR 243.100), by filing a Form 8-K or by another method reasonably designed to provide broad, non-exclusionary distribution (17 CFR 243.101(e)). In the EU, issuers must disclose inside information that directly concerns them as soon as possible (Article 17 of the Market Abuse Regulation (EU) 596/2014); since June 5, 2026, intermediate steps in a protracted process are exempt and only the final event must be disclosed (Regulation (EU) 2024/2809). Photos sent with a release are protected too: in the US, copyright in a photograph protects the photographer's artistic choices (Copyright Office Circular 42), so the sender needs the rights to every image it supplies.

• Check that there is news: something new and concrete that the outlet's readers care about, not just your company.
• Write the lead first, answering who, what, when, where, why and how.
• Derive the headline from it, with a concrete fact.
• Order the body from most to least important and leave out what adds nothing.
• Add a quote with a name and title that says something the text does not already say.
• Close with the boilerplate and the media contact.
• Attach or link images you hold the rights to, with captions and credits.
• Decide whether to set an embargo, and if you do, give the date, time and time zone.
• Choose the recipients: your own list, a wire service or both, and post the release in your press room.
• If you draft with AI, check every figure, name and quote yourself before sending.
• Answer questions quickly, and follow up only where there is likely to be real interest.

• One story per release.
• A headline under one line, without self-praise.
• Figures with a source and date, so journalists can check them.
• The release in the body of the email and on the website, not only as a PDF attachment.
• A contact person who answers the same day.

• Sending a release without news, just to get the name out.
• Burying the main fact in the third paragraph.
• Filler quotes such as "we are very proud".
• Sending to the whole list without checking what each journalist covers.
• Stuffing the release with SEO links and optimized anchor text.
• Attaching images without rights or credits.

This entry was written in November 2026 with AI assistance. It started from an analysis of the top ten search results in Spain, the US and Germany, in order to add what they leave out: the origin with sources from 1906, a real release broken down, the difference from a press kit and a media advisory, measurement without advertising value equivalency, and the legal framework. The examples are releases published by the companies themselves. It was reviewed before publication and contains no client data.