AI can draft a clean press release in two minutes. Getting a journalist to open it is the part nobody teaches. After hundreds of pitches, here's both.
I’ve written and sent enough press releases to know the writing was never the hard part, and now that AI can produce a clean one in two minutes, it’s definitely not. The bar has moved to the hook and the pitch. Use AI for structure, headlines, and a short personalized pitch, then do the one thing it can’t: send it to the right journalist with a reason it matters to their beat.
Yes, and more than the “PR is dead” crowd will tell you. Cision’s 2025 State of the Media Report surveyed over 3,000 journalists and found 72% named press releases as the most useful resource PR teams can offer, with 79% relying on them to generate story ideas.[1] Reporters want the release. What they don’t want is yours specifically, when it’s a wall of corporate fluff aimed at the wrong beat.
That’s the shift AI creates, and I don’t think most marketers have caught up to it yet. When anyone can generate a polished, grammatically flawless release in two minutes, the writing stops being your edge. I’ve reviewed a stack of AI-drafted releases this year, and the problem is never the grammar. It’s that they announce something no one outside the company cares about and dress it up as news.
So we’re going to use AI for what it’s brilliant at, structure and speed, and spend our own judgment on the two things that decide whether you get coverage: the hook and the pitch. Get those right and the release almost writes itself.
Here’s the mistake I see on repeat. People write the release first, then try to reverse-engineer why it’s newsworthy. It’s backwards. Find the news first, and if there isn’t any, you don’t have a press release, you have an ad with a dateline.
A real hook answers one question: why would a stranger care today? A new hire isn’t news. A new hire who’s the youngest person ever appointed to that role, or who just left a famous competitor, might be. A funding round is barely news. What you’ll do with the money, and the jobs it creates in a specific town, gets closer.
This is where I’d point AI first, and almost nobody does. Use it to pressure-test your angle before you commit a minute to writing.
If it comes back and tells you none of your angles are strong, believe it. It just saved you from burning a journalist relationship on a non-story, and those relationships are the whole asset.
Press releases follow a format for a reason: journalists scan them the same way every time, and a familiar shape gets read faster. Tell your AI to follow it exactly, no creative liberties.
Headline: the news in one line, specific and boring in the best way. Save clever for your ad copy.
Dateline and lead paragraph: city, date, then who-what-when-where-why in the first two sentences. Write it assuming the reporter reads only this. If the story isn’t clear from the opening paragraph, it isn’t clear.
Body: the detail, a quote from a real person that sounds like a real person, and supporting facts or data. Cision found 70% of journalists want releases packaged with supporting images or data, so plan to include a stat or a visual, not tack one on.[1]
Boilerplate: the standard paragraph about your company at the end. Write it once, reuse it forever.
The quote is where AI-drafted releases fall apart every time. Left alone, the model writes quotes that sound like a press release: “We are thrilled to leverage this exciting opportunity.” No human has ever said that out loud. We’ll fix it in the editing step.
One structural point that trips people up: put your most important fact in the headline and first sentence, don’t build to it like a short story. Journalists write inverted-pyramid style, most important first, because editors cut from the bottom. If your big number is hiding in paragraph four, a busy reporter never reaches it. So instruct the AI plainly: lead with the single most newsworthy fact, and make everything after it supporting detail a reader could stop at anywhere and still have the story.
With the hook locked, drafting is quick. Feed the model your angle and facts, and be specific about tone, because tone is where it defaults to hype.
“Write a press release announcing [news], using this angle: [your chosen hook]. Follow standard format: headline, dateline, a lead paragraph covering who/what/when/where/why in two sentences, two body paragraphs, one quote from [name, title], and a boilerplate. Newsroom tone, no marketing hype, no words like ‘thrilled’, ‘excited’, ‘revolutionary’, or ‘game-changer’. Facts: [paste].”
“Give me eight headline options for this release. Half straight and factual, half with a bit more hook, all under 12 words. No colons-and-buzzwords formulas.”
“Rewrite this quote so it sounds like a real person talking, not a press release. It should say something with an actual opinion or specific detail, something the person would be happy to see printed. Current quote: [paste].”
If you’re building a wider content engine around your announcements, the same source material stretches a long way. Our guides on writing a case study with AI and writing a blog post with AI both pair naturally with a launch.
This is the part that decides everything and the part AI-first marketers rush past. The release is the attachment. The pitch email is what determines whether anyone opens the attachment. And journalists are ruthless about length.
Cision’s data is blunt: 28% of journalists prefer pitches of 100 to 200 words, and just 2% want anything over 400.[1] Shorter wins. Your pitch is not a second press release. It’s a two-sentence reason this specific person should care.
The highest-leverage edit you’ll ever make is the first line, and it’s the one line AI can’t write for you, because it hasn’t read the journalist’s last article. You have. A line that proves it (“Your piece last month on X made me think you’d want to see this”) is the entire difference between opened and deleted. If cold outreach is your weak spot generally, our guide on writing cold emails with AI runs on the same principles.
Now read the whole thing as the reporter who gets 200 of these before lunch. You’re hunting for reasons to hit delete, because that’s what they’re doing.
Cut every adjective that isn’t carrying a fact. “A powerful new platform” tells a journalist nothing. “A platform that cut onboarding from three weeks to four days” is a story. Numbers survive edits. Adjectives get trimmed and nobody misses them.
Then check relevance one final time, because it’s the number-one killer by a distance. Cision found 86% of journalists reject a pitch simply because it isn’t relevant to their audience or beat.[1] A flawless release sent to the wrong person is a delete every time. Before you send, you should be able to say out loud the exact reason this journalist, not just this outlet, would run it. If you’re unsure the final copy holds up, our checklist on evaluating AI-generated marketing content makes a solid last pass.
Sooner or later someone suggests paying a wire service like PR Newswire or Business Wire to blast your release to thousands of outlets. Before you spend the money, be clear on what you’re actually buying, because it’s widely misunderstood.
A wire pushes your release onto a lot of websites automatically, which helps with two specific things: satisfying a formal disclosure requirement (public companies sometimes have to distribute news this way), and picking up a scatter of low-value syndicated republishes that can nudge links and searchability. What a wire almost never buys you is a real journalist choosing to write a real story. Reporters don’t sit reading the wire hoping for gold. The coverage that moves anything still comes from a targeted, personal pitch to a specific human.
My honest read, after years of watching this play out for clients: for most small and mid-sized businesses, that budget goes further as your own time doing targeted outreach than as a wire blast. Use the wire when you have a genuine disclosure need or a launch big enough that broad pickup matters. Otherwise, ten personalized pitches will out-earn a blast to ten thousand inboxes.
Where AI helps either way is the prep: building your media list, drafting the personalized notes, tracking who you contacted and what they said. It scales the admin around outreach. It doesn’t replace the relationship, and anyone selling “AI-powered mass distribution” as a substitute for that is selling you noise.
You can write a perfect release and kill it with bad timing. Journalists work to a rhythm, and landing in the wrong part of it buries your email under forty others while they’re on deadline.
The rule that’s held up for me over the years: mid-morning, mid-week. Tuesday to Thursday, before lunch, tends to catch reporters while they’re planning rather than filing. Monday is inbox-triage chaos; Friday afternoon is a graveyard. If your news is tied to a date, an event or a launch, get the release and pitch to the right journalists a few days ahead under a clear embargo (a simple “embargoed until 9am Tuesday” line), so they have time to write instead of being asked to react in real time.
AI can’t tell you the perfect minute, but it’s genuinely useful for the logistics: drafting the embargo note, building a simple send schedule, and prepping your follow-up in advance so you’re not writing it in a panic on the morning. Just remember the rule that overrides all timing advice, relevance beats timing every time. A perfectly-timed pitch to the wrong reporter is still a delete.
The best release in the world does nothing sitting in your drafts. Build a small, real list instead of blasting a hundred generic addresses, which is the fastest way to get flagged as spam and torch your sender reputation.
Find the specific reporters who cover your space. Read three of their recent pieces so your opening line is genuine, not flattery. Use AI to organize and track the outreach, but keep the targeting human, because relevance is the whole game. Ten well-chosen, personalized pitches beat a hundred cold ones, and they won’t cost you credibility with the people you’ll want to pitch again next quarter.
Last thing, on follow-ups: Cision found most journalists consider a single follow-up appropriate, and more than that annoys them. Send one polite nudge a few days later, then move on. Persistence is not a trait editors reward, and your reputation travels with you.
AI can draft a well-structured, grammatically clean press release in minutes, and it’s genuinely good at that. But it can’t find your news hook or judge whether a story is worth pitching, and it writes robotic quotes by default. Use it for structure and speed, and add the newsworthiness and human quotes yourself.
The release itself is usually one page, around 300 to 500 words. The pitch email you send with it should be far shorter: Cision found most journalists prefer pitches of 100 to 200 words, and almost none want anything over 400. Lead with the news and keep it tight.
Irrelevance, overwhelmingly. Cision found 86% of journalists reject pitches that don’t fit their audience or beat. After that, it’s hype-heavy language with no real news, robotic quotes, and pitches that are too long. A great release sent to the wrong reporter still gets deleted.
Draft it with AI, but always rewrite it. Left alone, AI produces quotes full of ‘thrilled’ and ‘excited’ that no real person says. Ask it to make the quote sound like an actual human with a specific opinion, then check it reads like something the named person would happily see in print.
You don’t fully automate it, and that’s the point. Use AI to draft the body and subject lines, but write the opening line yourself after reading the journalist’s recent work. Ten personalized pitches beat a hundred generic ones, so keep the list small and the targeting human.
This article is part of Future Factors’ practical AI series for marketers. It’s written by a marketer with 10+ years sending pitches, and focuses on using AI to write press releases and media outreach that actually get opened, not just drafted.
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