Newsroom editors and wire services skim hundreds of releases a day. Most get discarded before the second paragraph. These are the five mistakes we see most often — and fix before anything goes out under a client's name.
If the headline and first sentence don't state what happened in plain terms, the release doesn't get read further. 'Company X Launches Feature Y' beats a vague, brand-voice headline every time — save the personality for the body copy.
A press release is a news format, not an advertisement. Superlatives ('revolutionary', 'game-changing') without evidence read as marketing copy and get filtered out by editors and spam filters alike. Specific, verifiable claims fare far better.
A named executive with a short, specific quote gives journalists something to lift directly into their own coverage. Generic quotes ('we're thrilled to offer this to our customers') give them nothing to work with.
No boilerplate, no contact information, no clear dateline — these are quick disqualifiers for wire services and outlets that need to verify a source before running anything.
A release about a niche B2B product sent to general consumer news wires gets zero pickup and can flag an account for future submissions. Matching the release to outlets that actually cover that industry is most of the work.
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