I keep seeing the same bad PR advice, particularly for press release writing, get passed around. Businesses and even marketing teams are still using a playbook from a decade ago, and it’s completely tanking their shot at getting any real media impact. It’s 2026. These old myths need to be put to rest so people can focus on what gets results.
Key Takeaways
- You can get a pickup rate that’s over 40% higher when the release has an actual news angle and goes to a journalist who actually covers that specific topic.
- Directly emailing personalized pitches to journalists and their editors is what gets you coverage, so you can’t just depend on a wire service to do the job for you.
- Embedding high-res images, short videos, or an infographic can lift engagement by as much as 80% because it makes the reporter’s job easier.
- The metric that matters is the actual result, earned media placements, referral traffic from those articles, social shares, not the vanity metric of how many outlets received the release.
Myth 1: Press Releases Are Dead
The first thing I hear is that the press release is dead, which is just plain wrong. The people saying this are usually looking at the collapse of print media or the noise on social and drawing the wrong conclusion about how the tool is supposed to be used now. Of course blasting a generic announcement to a thousand random news desks is a total waste of time and money. A targeted, well-crafted release sent to the right person is still an incredibly effective way to generate earned media.
The numbers support this. According to a 2025 study from HubSpot Research, companies can still attribute about 15% of their positive media hits directly to a release that was placed correctly. What you’re doing is handing a reporter a fact-checked, structured starting point for a story they might actually write. Think about when Tesla announced their Q3 2025 earnings. That single press release was the primary source for hundreds of articles, and because of it, their key messages were reported correctly. If they hadn’t issued one, every reporter would have been scrambling for details, and you can bet inaccuracies would have been all over the place.
Myth 2: More Distribution Channels Equal More Coverage
This idea that more distribution means more coverage is just the “spray and pray” method, and it’s probably the biggest waste of money in PR. I see so many companies buying into the sales pitch from wire services that blasting their news to thousands of outlets is how you get seen. It’s not. A reporter gets hundreds of pitches a day, and a generic wire release is just another piece of junk in their inbox that gets instantly deleted. I’ve seen teams torch their entire quarterly budget on a big wire send and have zero legitimate pickups to show for it.
You’ll always get better results with a small, highly targeted list than you will with a massive, generic one. The work is in building real relationships with the handful of journalists who actually cover your specific corner of the world. There was a report from eMarketer in late 2025 that found a personalized email pitch to a relevant journalist gets a response rate nearly three times higher than a mass-distributed wire release. It’s common sense, right? If you’ve built a new AI cybersecurity tool, you’re not going to send it to every newspaper in America. You’re going to hand-pick the enterprise software reporters at Wired and TechCrunch. When you mention their recent work in your pitch, it signals that you’re not a robot and you respect their beat, which is the only way a good targeted approach can even begin.
Myth 3: Press Releases Are Just for Major Announcements
Thinking that press releases are only for giant news, a merger, a big acquisition, a major product launch, is a huge missed opportunity. When you think that narrowly, you miss the chance to use them as a tool for maintaining a regular presence with the media and building your company’s authority.
You can create your own news. Your company is probably sitting on data about an industry trend that you could package into a data-driven release. For instance, a fintech company can use its internal analytics to issue a release about new consumer spending habits, which immediately makes them a credible source for any reporter working on a personal finance or economics story and gets their execs quoted. You can do the same thing with other events like significant new hires or even community projects, provided you can find an angle that connects your internal news to a larger conversation happening in your industry. A IAB report from Q4 2025 showed this exact thing: providing consistent, useful content in a release format is how you build the trust that leads to long-term media relationships.
Myth 4: The Headline Is All That Matters
The belief that only the headline matters is a rookie mistake. Sure, a good headline might get your email opened, but the release gets deleted two seconds later if there’s no substance. I can’t count the number of times I’ve clicked on a release with some flashy headline only to find a wall of marketing jargon and buzzwords that tell me absolutely nothing about what the news actually is. Any journalist who opens that is gone in an instant.
The body has to immediately answer the basic questions: who, what, when, where, and why. That’s why we use the inverted pyramid, with the single most important fact of the story at the very top so a reporter doesn’t have to hunt for it. Your opening sentence should be a complete summary. The quotes you include must offer some perspective or opinion, something more than just a dry restatement of a fact you’ve already mentioned. A CEO explaining why this product changes things for the customer is a usable quote, whereas a quote listing the product’s features is just filler. Reporters will lift good quotes verbatim. And include multimedia, a Nielsen analysis in early 2026 showed that releases with visuals get 70% more views than the ones with only text, which makes perfect sense because it gives the journalist an asset they can use right away.
Myth 5: You Can’t Track Press Release Effectiveness
If someone tells you it’s impossible to track the ROI of a press release, they’re working with an obsolete definition of PR. That belief comes from the old ‘spray and pray’ days when you had no real way to measure what happened after you sent a release out into the world. That’s just not how it works anymore with the tools we have now.
Modern tracking platforms let you see far beyond the simple vanity metric of how many outlets syndicated your release. You should be looking for a spike in website traffic right after a story is published, digging into your analytics to see which specific article is sending you the most referrals, and monitoring social media for mentions and the general sentiment around your news. Using media monitoring tools like Mention or Brandwatch lets you track things like share of voice against your competitors. You can get even more specific by putting UTM parameters in the links in your release, which allows you to see exactly how many people clicked through and what they did on your website. For example, if a release you issued about a new software feature leads to a 20% increase in demo requests and your analytics show they all came from a link in one specific tech blog’s article, that’s a concrete result you can point to.
Forget these old rules if you want to get actual media coverage. Focus your energy on targeting the right reporters, writing a story that’s actually newsworthy, and then measuring the results that count.
So how long should a press release be now, in 2026?
Stick to the 400 to 600 word range. This gives you enough space to include all the necessary details for a story without dumping a novel into a busy journalist’s inbox. Just get straight to the point.
Do I really have to include images or a video?
Yes, absolutely. When you include high-res photos, an infographic, or a link to a short video clip, you’re handing the journalist assets they can immediately use. That makes their job easier, and it makes them far more likely to cover your story.
How frequently should my company send out releases?
You should only send a release when there’s actual news to report. That might be a new product, a significant partnership, a real company milestone, or some proprietary data you’ve analyzed. If you send them out on a schedule just to hit some internal quota, you’ll burn your credibility with reporters fast.
Should I use a wire service or just pitch journalists myself?
A mix can be fine, but direct pitching has to be your main focus. A wire service gives you wide distribution and some SEO value, which is okay, but the best coverage, the feature stories, the in-depth articles, will almost always be the result of a personal pitch you sent to a specific journalist who knows your industry.
What’s the one thing that matters most in a press release?
It’s the news angle. Period. If you don’t have a strong, clear reason why an audience outside your company should care about this information, then nothing else you write in the release will make a difference. It’s dead on arrival.
