• 4-minute read
• 24th May 2018

5 Questions to Ask When Writing a Press Release

Every ambitious business will need to write a press release at some point. These are short documents used to let journalists know about milestones, achievements and other news from your organisation.

But what goes into a good press release? One approach is to ask yourself five questions that cover all the key details. In the rest of this blog post, we’re going to run through those questions.

1. Who Are the Key Players?

The obvious answer to this is ‘your company’. But usually there will be others involved, such as:

• Employees who have been hired or promoted
• Other companies you’re working with
• Customers or clients

Essentially, you may want to mention anyone to whom your news is relevant! In addition, press releases are most effective when targeted at a particular audience, so think about who you will send the press release to so you can tailor it accordingly (e.g. if you’re developing a new phone app, you would write it for and contact tech journalists).

2. What’s New?

This is the whole reason you’re writing a press release! As such, the challenge here is not knowing what happened, but how you communicate this. Your first step should be a catchy headline:

ProofreadMyDocument Discovers New Type of Comma

Headlines should be short, but they need to grab the attention. You may also want to add a subheading with extra detail. After that, your first full paragraph should set out all the key information that you need to communicate. This can then be expanded upon in the next paragraphs.

3. Why Does This Matter?

Nobody writes a press release for fun, so think about why the news is important. What consequences does it have? Why do people need to know? And most importantly, what do you want to achieve by spreading this news? Keep it short and focus on these issues.

4. When and Where?

If your news is specific to a time and place (e.g. a one-off event in a particular town), you will need to include this in your press release. But you also need to consider the timing of your press release.

The timing should be related to what you want to achieve. For example, if you’re promoting a Christmas sale, then releasing it in June is far too early, but releasing it on Christmas Eve is obviously too late!

For coverage in the run-up to an event, send the press release 3-5 days before you want the news to appear in the media (you can include an embargo to ensure it doesn’t go out early). If you want coverage about something that has already happened, send it as soon as possible afterwards.

5. How Did This Happen?

This is about fleshing out your headline and opening paragraph by giving some background information. This might be where your new hire used to work, past instances of your business holding a similar event, or even just the details of how a change was introduced.

The key is to make this information quotable, and one way to do this is to include a quote in the press release. Ask one of the key figures involved for a short sound bite relevant to the press release. This gives the people you send it to an easy way to excerpt something and use it in their write up!

If you can cover all these points, the content of your press release should be pretty much perfect. All you need to do now is write it up, get it proofread and send it out into the world!

Click here to see our example press release.