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Press Release · How to / How not to

How to Write a Press Release (and How Not To)

Most press releases are a company shouting "we exist" into a void that already knew, and didn't care.

By Cynical SallyIssue Nº 1

A press release has exactly one job: make a busy journalist, who gets 200 of these before lunch, keep reading past the first line. That's it. Not impress your board, not flatter your CEO, not cram every adjective from the brand deck into one breathless paragraph. One job.

This is what you getA real Full Truth, in full
Cynical SallyPress Release

The Full Truth

on A startup's Series A funding-round press release

3.8
out of ten
You used the word 'revolutionize' twice and the words 'how much you raised' zero times. Bold choice for a funding announcement.
The Investigation
  1. 01

    The news is missing from the news

    Critical

    Your headline says 'Announces Funding to Accelerate Growth' with no amount, no round name, no investors. The one fact a reporter needs to decide if this matters isn't in the first 50 words. Put '$12M Series A led by Acme Ventures' right in the headline.

  2. 02

    The founder quote says nothing in 40 words

    Critical

    'We're incredibly excited to partner with investors who share our vision for the future.' That sentence fits any company on earth. Replace it with a concrete claim: what the money buys, by when, for whom.

  3. 03

    Boilerplate is wearing the lead's clothes

    Notable

    Three sentences of 'founded in 2021 with a mission to empower' sit above the actual announcement. Move all of it to the 'About' block at the bottom where editors expect to skip it.

The Copy Clinic

Today, TechCo, a leading innovator in workflow solutions, is thrilled to announce that it has successfully closed a new round of funding to accelerate its mission of revolutionizing how teams work.

TechCo raised $12M in Series A funding led by Acme Ventures, money it will use to triple its engineering team and ship its automation product to enterprise customers by Q4.

"We are incredibly excited to partner with world-class investors who believe in our vision," said the CEO.

"This buys us 18 months to get from 40 customers to 400 without raising again," said CEO Jane Doe. "That was the whole point."

The Action Plan
  1. 1Rewrite the headline to state the amount, the round, and the lead investor. If those three facts aren't there, you don't have a headline, you have a teaser.
  2. 2Cut the first paragraph entirely and promote the real news to the top. Read it cold: does a stranger know what happened after one sentence?
  3. 3Replace every founder quote with one specific, falsifiable claim about what the money does. No 'thrilled', no 'journey', no 'vision'.
  4. 4Move all history and mission language into a labeled 'About' block at the bottom, then send it to one reporter who actually covers your space, not a list of 500.
Yours for the price of a coffee.Printed with disdain
Your turn

That was a stranger's press release. Drop yours, I will go just as hard.

One coffee, from €2,99. No mercy.

Almost nobody does that job. They bury the actual news under three sentences of mission statement, quote their own founder calling the product 'revolutionary', and attach a logo nobody asked for. So let's fix the thing you keep getting wrong, starting with the part you think is the easy bit.

How to do it right
  • 01Lead with the news in the first sentence. Who did what, how big, why it matters. If a reader stops after one line, they should still have the story.
  • 02Put a real, specific number in the headline. '$12M Series A' beats 'significant funding'. Numbers are the only thing that survives the skim.
  • 03Write quotes a human would actually say out loud. If your founder wouldn't say it at a bar, cut it and rewrite it in plain speech.
  • 04Front-load the inverted pyramid: most important fact first, context second, boilerplate dead last where it belongs.
  • 05Give the journalist everything they need to file without calling you: numbers, names, dates, a contact who answers, and links that work.
How not to
  • Opening with 'Today, [Company], a leading provider of...' which tells the reader nothing and signals the next 400 words will also tell them nothing.
  • A founder quote that says 'We are thrilled and excited to be on this incredible journey.' Thrilled is not news. Journeys are not news.
  • Burying the actual funding amount in paragraph four, after the mission, the vision, and a sentence about 'the future of work'.
  • Stacking adjectives like sandbags: 'innovative, disruptive, AI-powered, next-generation, end-to-end' all before the company has said what it does.
  • A headline written for the CEO's ego ('[Company] Announces Major Milestone') instead of for the reporter's word count.