Press Release

Companies have always had things worth announcing and no channel for announcing them. The only route was calling a reporter and explaining, and a single reporter fields dozens of approaches a day. Nobody has time to sit through a fifteen-minute explanation on the phone.

So reporters decide whether to keep reading within the first few lines. When Pagedeck was announcing its Series A, Ravi's first draft opened with "we're building the future of collaboration." It went to twenty outlets and drew zero replies. The second draft opened with "Pagedeck has raised a $6 million Series A," and five outlets got in touch.

A press release is the format that makes that decision possible in thirty seconds. It arranges what an article needs in the order an article needs it. Every question a reporter no longer has to ask raises the odds of the story running. A release that answers who, what and how many leaves them a paragraph they can lift almost unchanged; one that answers none of those leaves them an interview to arrange first.

Six things fit on one page.

1. A headline carrying one fact that happened. "Pagedeck launches automatic meeting-notes cleanup" names an actor and an event. A headline like "a new beginning in how we work" doesn't say what occurred, so nobody reaches the second line.
2. A first paragraph. Who did what, when, where, and why, packed into one paragraph. A reporter judges the release on this alone, so the most important fact belongs in the opening sentence, with everything less important trailing behind it. Editors cut from the bottom up, and the release takes the same shape so that whatever survives the cut is still the part you cared about.
3. The body. Numbers and context that support the opening. Twelve hundred companies signed up in advance; internal trials cut the time spent tidying meeting notes to a third of what it was. Numbers, not adjectives — a claim with no figure attached tends to vanish in the edit, because the reporter has no way to stand behind it.
4. A quote. One or two lines from the founder or the person responsible. Interpretation belongs here rather than in the body. "A significant shift for the industry" reads as overreach in the body and as the company's own view inside quotation marks.
5. A boilerplate paragraph. What the company does, in one paragraph reused across every announcement — founding date, headcount, funding history.
6. Contacts and assets. A named person with a phone number and an email address, plus the address of the media kit where logos and product screenshots can be downloaded. That single line prevents an image request landing in someone's inbox two hours before deadline.

Keep it to one page. Past that, the back half goes unread, and filling space with unread material pushes the opening down.

It's written by whoever handles public relations or marketing — at Pagedeck, Ravi. It isn't finished alone, though. Numbers get confirmed by the team that produced them, the founder's quote goes to Grace directly, and anything involving funding or contract amounts gets checked for what's allowed to be disclosed. Correcting a figure after an announcement costs you reply rates on the next one.

The thing to understand about the audience is that the first reader is a reporter, not the public. A reporter reads this document as raw material. Whether the prose is elegant matters far less than how many verifiable facts it contains — a release with six checkable facts is easier to write from than one with two paragraphs of ambition. A useful test is to count the sentences a reporter could publish word for word; if the answer is none, the draft isn't finished.

The public reads it second-hand, through the article. Investors, job candidates and competitors read it too. Someone who lands on your careers page often searches the company name and finds a release from six months ago, so it gets written with that later reading in mind as well.

Distribution isn't a mass mailing. Working from the list built through media relations, you pick the reporters who actually cover your field and send each of them the angle they're likely to care about. If the announcement needs real reporting time, send it several days ahead under an embargo so the publication times line up. The same document also goes on the company's own press page.

"The draft came in and the first paragraph has no facts in it."

There's nothing a reporter can turn into an article.

"Move that sentence into the quote. In the body it reads as an exaggeration."

Separate the company's opinion from what can be verified.

"Embargo at 10am Thursday, and we send it Tuesday."

Give reporters time to work while keeping the publication time aligned.

When Pagedeck shipped automatic meeting-notes cleanup, Ravi revised the release three times. The first version ran twelve lines of feature description and carried no numbers. The second added the advance sign-up count and the time saved in internal trials. The third cut the opening paragraph to a single line and pushed the rest down.

It went to five outlets picked off the list. The reporter who mostly covers startups got growth-since-funding in the opening line; the one who covers how teams work got the reduction in meeting time. The same facts, reordered. Three of the five ran a story.

The most common belief is that issuing a release produces coverage. From the sending side, distribution looks like the last step, so it reads that way. But a reporter decides, and that decision rests on whether the announcement is a story for their readers. Shipping a feature is rarely enough on its own; what it changes, for how many companies, has to arrive attached to a number. Manufacture a release in a month with nothing to announce and your next email — the one about something that actually matters — gets deleted first. Two or three announcements a year that each carry a real number do more than one a month that carries none.

The second mistake is writing it for the public. It's an official document with the company name on it, so the temptation is to write it like an advertisement. Written that way, it leaves a reporter with no usable sentence: adjectives that can't be quoted and no figures that can be checked. Building brand awareness happens after the article exists. A release that tries to do that job itself gets neither the coverage nor the awareness.