Something I’ve noticed after nearly ten years of working with clients at Payper is that the businesses with the most polished, beautifully designed press kits are almost never the ones that get the most coverage. The ones that do tend to have something much simpler: a page or a folder with the right information, clearly labelled, easy to find, and updated within the last six months.
That’s a press kit that works. And most businesses don’t have one.
A press kit is one of those things that sits quietly in the background of good media relations, rarely exciting and almost never urgent, until the moment a journalist needs it. Then it either makes their job easier or it doesn’t exist, and they move on to someone whose does.
What actually goes in a press kit?
A press kit is everything a journalist needs to cover your business without having to email you and wait for a reply. Company overview, executive bios, high-resolution images, recent press releases, key facts and figures, and contact details for a real person who actually picks up the phone.
That’s the core of it. Not a brand manifesto, not a sales deck with 47 slides, not a glossy PDF that took six months to design. Just the essentials, organised clearly and accessible without a login.
The reason simplicity matters is practical. Cision’s 2026 State of the Media report found that 66% of journalists rely on PR-provided content, including press releases, pitches and media kits, for story ideas. But relying on something and having time to dig through it are two different things. In New Zealand, where the journalism workforce has shrunk from over 4,000 to roughly 1,400 in the last two decades, reporters are covering more beats with fewer resources than ever. When a journalist is deciding between two stories of similar merit, the one where they can pull a high-res headshot and a clean company description in thirty seconds will win over the one that requires three emails and a follow-up.
Here’s what should be in yours:
- Company overview: Two to three paragraphs, factual, written for a journalist not a customer. We’ll come back to this one, because it’s where most press kits fall apart.
- Founder and executive bios: Third person, relevant achievements and background, 100 to 150 words each. Include what makes them a credible source on their industry, not just their job title.
- Key facts and figures: Founding year, team size, revenue milestones if public, customer numbers, anything concrete a journalist can cite. The businesses that do this well, like Evnex in New Zealand’s EV charging space, give journalists numbers they can anchor a story around without going digging.
- High-resolution images: Headshots, product shots, team photos and logos in multiple formats. This is the single most undervalued element in any press kit, and we’ll cover why below.
- Recent press releases or announcements: The last three to five, with dates. If you need help writing these, we’ve put together a guide on how to write a press release that journalists will actually read.
- Previous media coverage: Your strongest three to five pieces, with links. This gives a journalist social proof that you’re a credible source other publications have already covered.
- Media contact details: A named person, a direct phone number, and an email that gets checked daily. Not info@, not a contact form, not a chatbot.
If you have video content, a short brand reel or founder interview clip, include a link. If you’ve won notable awards, list the most recent ones. But resist the temptation to add everything. A press kit that tries to tell your complete story will get ignored, while one that gives a journalist what they need to tell their version of your story will get used.
How do you write a company overview that doesn’t sound like marketing?
This is where most press kits fall apart. The company overview reads like it was written by the marketing team for the marketing team, full of words like “innovative,” “cutting-edge,” “passionate about disruption,” and “leveraging synergies to deliver world-class solutions.”
Journalists don’t want marketing copy. They want facts they can lift straight into a story. What does the company do, who does it serve, how big is it, where is it based, and why would anyone outside your industry care?
Write it the way you’d explain your business to someone at a barbecue who asked what you do for a living. Two to three paragraphs. Mix your sentence lengths. No superlatives unless they’re verifiable, and even then, use them sparingly.
A good test: if you can remove the company name and the overview could belong to any of your competitors, it’s too generic. The details that make your business specific, the founding story, the unusual business model, the problem you noticed that nobody else was solving, those are the details that make a journalist’s ears prick up. If you’re not sure how to find those details, our guide on how to tell your founder story is a good place to start.
At Payper, one of the first things we do with new clients is check whether they have a working press kit. Most don’t, and the ones that do are often out of date or written in a way that makes it harder, not easier, for a journalist to find the story. When we helped Kea Aerospace with their media presence, having clear, factual materials about what their solar-powered drones actually do and who they serve meant journalists could write confidently about a complex, technical product without misrepresenting the technology.
Where should your press kit live?
On your website. Not in a Google Drive folder that requires permission. Not in a Dropbox link that expires after 30 days. Not buried four clicks deep in a footer menu labelled “Resources.”
The standard in 2026 is a dedicated media or press page on your website, prominently linked from your main navigation or footer. Everything should be viewable and downloadable directly, without requiring an email address, a login, or a form submission. The moment you put a gate between a journalist and the information they need, you’ve lost a percentage of them, and in a small market like New Zealand where there are roughly 1,400 working journalists covering the entire country, you can’t afford to lose any.
Your images deserve special attention here. Provide a range of options: horizontal and vertical crops, different team members, product shots in context. Make sure they’re genuinely high resolution, the minimum for print is 300 DPI, and for online use you want images at least 1,200 pixels wide. Label everything clearly so a journalist on deadline can find what they need without opening fifteen files called “IMG_4782.jpg.”
If hosting a full media page feels like too much right now, a simple landing page with a downloadable ZIP file of your key assets and a written overview works perfectly well. The point is accessibility, not design awards.
What do journalists actually pull from a press kit?
Almost without exception, the same three things: images, the company overview, and contact details. Everything else is supporting material that might get used depending on the story, but those three are the foundation.
High-resolution images are worth singling out because they are so consistently undervalued. When a journalist is filing under deadline and needs a photo, they will either use what you’ve provided or pull whatever they can find online, which might be a blurry screenshot from your Facebook page circa 2019 or a photo of the wrong person entirely. Consumer brands like Scapegrace Distilling understand this instinctively, strong product photography doesn’t just look nice, it directly influences how prominently and how favourably your story gets placed.
Muck Rack’s 2026 State of Journalism report found that 58% of journalists want access to credible sources and 40% value original data when evaluating pitches. A press kit that includes both, a named spokesperson who is genuinely available and a few interesting data points about your business or industry, gives the journalist two of the three things they care about most before they’ve even picked up the phone.
The third thing, relevance to their beat, is the part you can’t manufacture in a press kit. But you can make it easier to assess. If your overview makes it immediately clear what industry you’re in and what makes you noteworthy, a journalist can decide in ten seconds whether you’re worth a deeper look. That efficiency matters when 88% of journalists immediately disregard pitches that don’t match their coverage area, according to the same Muck Rack research. The easier you make it for a reporter to see whether you’re relevant to their audience, the less likely you are to end up in that 88%.
How often should you update your press kit?
Every time something material changes, but at minimum every six months. A press kit with a team photo from three years ago and a bio that still mentions a role someone left eighteen months ago tells a journalist more about your organisation than you’d like. It says nobody is paying attention, and if nobody is paying attention to the basics, the journalist reasonably wonders what else might be out of date.
The things that change most often and get updated least often are executive bios, because people get promoted or leave, key facts like revenue and team size and customer numbers, and images, because your team looks different now than it did when you commissioned that group photo in 2022. Set a calendar reminder twice a year to review everything on the page, and treat it with the same seriousness you’d give your LinkedIn profile or your investor deck.
It’s also worth noting that in 2026, your press kit isn’t just serving human journalists. AI search tools increasingly pull from structured, factual content on credible websites when constructing answers about businesses and industries. A well-maintained media page with clear, current information about your company gives you a better chance of being accurately represented when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity about your industry. Which is one more reason to keep it honest, specific, and up to date.
The mistakes that make journalists close the tab
After years of watching clients build and rebuild their media pages at Payper, and after hearing from dozens of journalists about what frustrates them, there are a handful of recurring errors that undermine otherwise decent press kits.
- No contact details, or a generic email. Journalists work on deadline. If they can’t find a named person with a direct number, they will move on to someone who makes it easier. Muck Rack’s research shows 69% of journalists prefer pitches under 200 words, which tells you something about how little patience they have for unnecessary friction in any part of the media relations process.
- Requiring a login or form submission to access materials. Every gate you add reduces the number of journalists who bother. Your press kit exists to make their job easier, not to capture leads for your CRM.
- Using only low-resolution images. A journalist who can’t find a usable photo will either skip the visual entirely, making your story less likely to get prominent placement, or use something unflattering that you’d rather they hadn’t.
- Writing the overview in marketing language. If your press kit says you’re “disrupting the space” and “leveraging cutting-edge AI-powered solutions,” a journalist has to do the work of translating that into something their audience will understand. Most won’t bother. Write for a reader, not a pitch deck.
- Letting it go stale. An outdated press kit is arguably worse than no press kit at all, because it introduces errors. A journalist who publishes the wrong job title or team size because that’s what your website said has every right to point the finger at you, not themselves.
Payper is a results-based PR agency in New Zealand where clients only pay when coverage lands, and one of the things we’ve learned over nearly ten years is that the unsexy parts of PR, the media list, the press release structure, the press kit, are almost always the parts that determine whether a good story actually gets told. The businesses that treat their press kit as a living document rather than a set-and-forget project are the ones journalists can work with quickly and confidently. And in a market as small as ours, where the same reporters cover the same beats year after year, that kind of reliability compounds in ways that are hard to replicate with any other approach.
If you’re not sure whether your press kit is helping or hurting you, or if you don’t have one yet and you’re wondering where to start, get in touch here and we’ll give you a straight answer.