When I was a reporter at Newshub (now ThreeNews) in Auckland, I would get somewhere between 50 and 100 press releases a day. Most of them got deleted within seconds. Not because the stories behind them were bad, necessarily, but because the releases themselves made it impossible to tell whether anything newsworthy was buried inside.
The ones I opened, read, and actually followed up on had something in common. They were written like news, not like marketing copy. They made my job easier instead of harder. And they respected the fact that I had about ten seconds to decide whether this was worth my time.
That experience shapes how we write every press release at Payper. We're a results-based PR agency, which means we get paid when coverage lands, so we have a strong incentive to get this right. What follows is everything we know about writing press releases that work, particularly in New Zealand, where the rules are a little different from what most international guides will tell you.
Before you write anything, answer one question
Is this actually news?
It sounds obvious, but it's the single most common point of failure. A new product feature, a small internal hire, a minor business milestone... these might feel significant inside your company, but journalists are assessing your release against every other story competing for column space that day. If the answer to "why would a reader who doesn't know this company care?" is uncertain, the release isn't ready.
We wrote a full guide on how to assess newsworthiness before you pitch, and it's worth reading before you sit down to draft anything. The filter you apply before writing is worth more than any amount of polish applied after.
The structure that works
Every press release should follow the inverted pyramid, a structure borrowed from journalism itself. The most important information goes at the top (the peak of the pyramid), with supporting detail layered underneath in descending order of significance. If a journalist stops reading after the first paragraph, they should still have the core story.
We've written about why the inverted pyramid matters in more detail elsewhere, but the practical application is straightforward. Lead with the news, support it with context, and fill in the background at the bottom. A journalist should be able to cut your release from the bottom up without losing anything essential.
If you want a checklist for the content itself, our guide to the 8 things journalists really want in a press release covers what to include and what to leave out.
Your first paragraph carries the entire release
The opening paragraph is the only part you can be reasonably confident a journalist will read. Everything else is a bonus. So your first paragraph needs to contain the full story in miniature: who is doing what, when, where, and why it matters.
Aim for 50 to 75 words. Answer the five Ws. Resist the temptation to tease or build suspense, that's a technique for features and opinion columns, not news writing. A journalist scanning 80 releases before lunch doesn't have time to wait for you to get to the point.
A practical test: read your first paragraph aloud and ask yourself whether someone hearing it for the first time would understand the story. If they'd need to read the second paragraph to know what's happening, rewrite.
Headlines: strong, specific, and probably more boring than you'd like
Your headline exists to tell a journalist what the story is in under ten words. It's not a marketing tagline, it's not a pun (please, never a pun), and it's not the place to be clever. Journalists see hundreds of headlines a day, and the ones that work are the ones that make the story immediately clear.
Use strong, active verbs, be specific, and include numbers, locations, or names where possible. "Christchurch AI Startup Raises $4.1 Million in Seed Funding" is a headline that works. "Exciting News from the Future of Technology" is a headline that gets deleted.
If you're struggling with the headline, write it last. By the time you've finished the release, the news should be so clear in your mind that the headline writes itself.
Quotes that journalists want to use
Quotes are where most press releases fall apart. The typical quote is a lifeless, corporate, committee-approved string of words that no human would ever actually say out loud. "We are thrilled to announce this exciting partnership that will deliver synergistic value to all stakeholders" is not a quote, it's a sentence that was written in a meeting and approved by legal.
Good quotes serve a specific function in a news story. Journalists use them for opinion, colour, and personal perspective, the things they can't write themselves as impartial reporters. So your quotes should contain an opinion, a personal reaction, or a piece of context that only the quoted person could provide.
Write the quote, then read it aloud. If it sounds like something the person would actually say in a conversation, it's probably fine. If it sounds like an annual report, rewrite it until it doesn't. One or two quotes is enough. Three is pushing it. More than three, and you're making the journalist work harder to find the ones worth using.
Keep it shorter than you think
Research from Cision consistently shows that press releases under 400 words get around 30% more media pickups than longer ones. This tracks with my experience as a journalist: a tight, focused release that respects your time is far more persuasive than a sprawling document that buries the news under three pages of background.
A good target is 300 to 500 words. Enough to tell the full story with supporting context, short enough that a busy journalist can assess it in under two minutes. If you have extensive background, technical detail, or supplementary information, put it in a separate document and offer it as available on request.
The elevator pitch
Every release should end with a short paragraph about the company, two to three sentences covering what the business does, when it was founded, and where it's based. This is called the elevator pitch, and it exists so journalists don't have to go looking for basic facts about who you are.
Below that, include a clear media contact with a name, email address, and phone number. Make this person someone who actually answers their phone. A journalist working to deadline who can't reach your contact within an hour will move on to another story, and they're unlikely to come back.
If you have high-resolution images or video available, mention it. Don't attach large files to the email, just note that imagery is available on request or link to a media kit.
What gets you deleted
Having sat on the receiving end of thousands of press releases, I can tell you the patterns that make a journalist hit delete:
- AI Slop: Anyone can pump out a generic press release with ChatGPT or Claude. Don't do it.
- Marketing language where facts should be. "Revolutionary", "game-changing", "world-class", "industry-leading"... these words communicate nothing except that the person writing the release couldn't find anything concrete to say.
- No clear news angle. If a journalist can't figure out what the story is within ten seconds, they're not going to invest another minute trying.
- Buried or missing contact details. I once received a press release about a building consent that didn't include the name of the building or the developer. It went in the bin.
- Sending it to the wrong journalist. A property reporter doesn't want your tech launch, and a tech reporter doesn't want your property development. According to Cision's research, 86% of journalists will immediately reject a pitch that doesn't match their beat, so targeting matters more than volume.
- Unsolicited attachments. Large PDFs, zip files, high-resolution photographs nobody asked for... all of these slow down an already overloaded inbox, and some get caught by email filters entirely.
In a small market, the press release follows you
New Zealand has roughly a quarter of the journalists it had 15 years ago. The media landscape is smaller, more concentrated, and the people in it have longer memories than you might expect. A well-written release that respects a journalist's time and delivers a genuine story builds your reputation in ways that compound over months and years.
The opposite is also true. Send sloppy, irrelevant, or misleading releases and you'll find that journalists stop opening your emails altogether, not just for this story, but for the next one, and the one after that. In a country where the same reporters cover the same beats year after year, your relationship with the media is an asset worth protecting.
We've seen this play out with clients like Kea Aerospace, a strong release paired with genuinely compelling technology meant the story practically told itself, but it still needed to be written in a way that made a busy journalist's job easier, not harder.
The release is just the beginning
A press release is a tool, not a strategy. Writing a good one is essential, but it's only part of the process. How you pitch it, who you send it to, and how you follow up all matter just as much. If you haven't already, it's worth reading our guide on how to pitch a journalist, which covers the outreach side of the equation.
And if you're doing all of this yourself because you don't have the budget for an agency yet, we wrote a complete guide to doing your own PR that walks through the full process from writing to pitching to follow-up.
If you'd prefer to hand the whole thing to someone who's done it a few thousand times, we're always happy to talk. Get in touch here and we'll give you a straight answer.