Press releases and announcements

A press release is written for a journalist, not a customer. That single fact explains most of what goes wrong with them: they get written as marketing, sent to people who do not read marketing, and then published on the company's own site where the audience is customers who would have preferred a plain announcement.

The test for whether something is news: would someone outside the company report this without being asked? If not, it is a blog post, and dressing it as news spends credibility with the people who might have covered the next thing.

The operational shape

Trigger. A company event — a launch, a partnership, a milestone, a raise.

Reads. The company story and positioning, from decisions. Cleared facts and numbers, from proof.

Cadence. Per event.

Gate. Approve before publish, strictest. Public, quoted, and syndicated to places you do not control.

What good looks like

The news is in the first sentence. Not the third paragraph after the context. A journalist reads until they know whether this is for them, and that decision happens fast.

The quote says something. A quote that any executive at any company in the category could have given is a quote that gets cut. If the person quoted would not say it aloud in an interview, it does not belong in their mouth on a wire.

Every number is cleared. Growth figures, customer counts, market sizes. These are the sentences that get quoted and the ones that get checked, and a press release is the worst place in the system to discover a number was approximate.

The boilerplate is reviewed. It is copied verbatim into every syndication, almost never re-read, and it is where claims about size, growth, and category leadership become permanent without anyone deciding they should.

It reads like a fact, not like an adjective. Superlatives in a release are the fastest signal to a journalist that there is nothing underneath.

When it goes stale

You do not hold all the copies. This is the one artifact in the whole set where correction is genuinely impossible — syndicated versions persist on sites you have no relationship with, and a correction on your own page does not reach them.

Three consequences. A claim that ages badly stays in circulation, permanently and out of your reach. A quote attributed to someone who has left remains attached to them and gets found. And a partnership or product that ended still has an announcement that reads as current, which is the version most likely to be quoted back in a sales conversation.

The practical rule follows directly: write only what stays true. A release is not the place for anything that depends on circumstances holding.

What it feeds

• Social posts — the announcement, at a different length
• The company page and the operating log — the durable record you do control
• Sales conversations — third-party coverage is the version that carries weight, which is the reason to do this properly rather than often