The Death of the Press Release and What Should Replace It

The press release is a fossil of a particular media economy: one in which a small number of journalists, working to deadline, needed pre-packaged, quotable, inverted-pyramid copy they could lightly edit and run. That economy is gone. The format outlived it.

I am not arguing that organisations should stop announcing things. I am arguing that the artefact we use to announce them is optimised for a distribution system that no longer exists.

What the release was actually for

Strip away the ceremony and a press release did three jobs:

• It gave a journalist the facts in a usable order.
• It supplied an on-the-record quote so the story had a voice.
• It signalled, by its mere existence, that an organisation considered something newsworthy.

The third job is the one that quietly took over. Most modern releases are not written for journalists at all. They are written for the internal stakeholders who needed to see their initiative dignified with a release. The audience is the org chart.

A document written to satisfy everyone who must approve it cannot also be a document anyone outside the building wants to read.

Why the format fails now

Journalists do not lack facts; they are drowning in them. What they lack is time, access, and a reason to care. The press release supplies facts they could find anyway, withholds the access they actually want, and buries the reason to care under a paragraph of attributed boilerplate.

Meanwhile, the audience that used to be reached through the press has fragmented. You can now reach most of your stakeholders directly. The intermediary the release was designed to serve is no longer the only door.

The replacement: the explainer of record

The format I keep recommending is not a press release with better adjectives. It is structurally different. Call it the explainer of record — a single, owned, durable page that does four things:

1. States what happened in one honest sentence. No "is pleased to announce." The sentence a sceptical reader would write.
2. Explains why it matters to someone who is not you. The "so what," stated in the reader's terms, not the organisation's.
3. Shows the working. The data, the context, the trade-offs you considered. This is the part organisations fear, and it is the part that builds credibility.
4. Makes a human reachable. Not a media inbox. A named person who can actually answer a question.

Why most organisations won't do it

The explainer of record is not hard to write. It is hard to approve, because it requires the organisation to say true things plainly and to show its reasoning. That is a governance problem dressed up as a content problem.

The release survives precisely because it is safe. It commits to nothing, reveals nothing, and offends no one in the approval chain. Its defenders mistake that safety for professionalism.

The organisations that will win the next decade of attention are the ones that figure out the press release was never protecting them. It was only protecting the process that produced it.