The Press Release Is Dead and Nobody Told the People Still Writing Them
The press release survives as a document type in almost perfect health. Volume is up. The wire services are profitable. Companies still employ people whose primary output is a two-page document beginning with a city name and a date, containing a quotation from an executive that no executive said.
What has died is the mechanism the format was built for. The release now persists for reasons that have nothing to do with communicating with a journalist, and understanding which reasons those are tells you what the format is turning into.
What it was for
The wire release solved a distribution problem that existed for about a century. A company had news. Newsrooms had wire terminals. Putting text onto the wire in a standard format meant every newsroom in the country received it simultaneously, in a shape their systems could ingest, with the legally significant details in a predictable place.
That was a genuine service and it justified genuine money. The format’s conventions all follow from it. The dateline exists because wire copy needed provenance. The boilerplate exists because a subeditor cutting from the bottom needed the company description to survive. The executive quotation exists because a reporter needed an attributable line without making a phone call.
Every one of those functions has been solved better by something else.
What killed the mechanism
Reporters stopped monitoring wires as a primary input. The stories now surface from social platforms, from direct relationships, from filings, from Discord and Slack channels, and from the reporter’s own beat.
Search engines stopped rewarding syndicated duplication, which removed the SEO rationale that had propped up wire spend through the 2010s. A release published verbatim across four hundred sites is, from a ranking perspective, four hundred copies of a document with no independent authority, and the links carry no weight.
And the volume grew past the point of usefulness. When a beat reporter receives several hundred releases a day, the release stops being a signal and becomes noise that has to be filtered, which means the thing determining coverage is the relationship rather than the document.
Why it persists anyway
Three reasons, none of them journalistic.
The first is legal. Public companies have disclosure obligations, and simultaneous broad dissemination is one of the recognised ways to satisfy them. A material announcement pushed through a recognised wire service creates a timestamped, archived, distributed record. That is a compliance artefact, and compliance artefacts do not die because they became unfashionable. A meaningful share of wire service revenue is this.
The second is internal. The release is the mechanism by which an organisation agrees with itself about what it is announcing. Legal, product, sales and the executive team all sign the same document, and by the time they have, the company has a single version of the story. That coordination function is real and would need replacing if the format vanished.
The third is habit dressed as strategy. A great many releases exist because the quarter requires announcements and the marketing calendar has a slot.
The part that is genuinely new
Here is the shift worth paying attention to. The release is being read again, at scale, by readers who behave exactly as the format assumes.
Machine readers do not skim. They do not have relationships with your competitors. They ingest the whole document, including the boilerplate, and they treat structured, dated, attributed, self-describing text as high-quality input. Language models summarising an industry, retrieval systems answering questions about a company, automated market monitoring: all of them consume the corpus that human journalists stopped reading.
Which means the conventions that became vestigial for humans are functional again for machines. The dateline is provenance. The boilerplate is entity description. The quotation is an attributed claim with a named source. The standard structure is a parseable schema.
The press release did not die. It changed audience, and the new audience wants the same document the old audience abandoned.
What follows from that
If the reader is a machine, most of what agencies optimise for is now actively counterproductive.
Vague superlatives are unparseable and get discarded. Specific numbers with units and periods survive. Executive quotations full of adjectives contribute nothing; quotations containing a factual claim get attributed and retained. Novel product names without a category description cannot be placed in a taxonomy. Announcements bundling three unrelated things into one document get summarised as one thing, usually the wrong one.
The practical instruction is unglamorous. Write it flat. Put the numbers in. Describe what the company does in words that would let a stranger classify it correctly. Announce one thing per document. Date everything explicitly rather than saying “today.”
That is a description of a well-written 1985 press release, which is the joke buried in all of this. The format did not need reinventing. It needed the promotional layer that accumulated over forty years stripped back off.
The uncomfortable version
The people still writing releases the old way are not wrong that the document matters. They are wrong about who is reading it, and therefore wrong about every stylistic choice that follows.
An industry spent two decades optimising a document for a reader who left, and is about to discover it optimised in exactly the wrong direction for the reader who arrived.