Press release

• 1. Introduction

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  In October 1906, a passenger train derailed near Atlantic City, New Jersey, killing fifty people. The Pennsylvania Railroad faced a crisis. Instead of letting the rumor mill run, a man named Ivy Lee did something that had never been done before. He wrote an honest, detailed account of the accident and handed it directly to reporters. The New York Times published his statement word for word.

  That moment planted the seed for one of the most powerful and contested tools in modern communication: the press release. Today it travels in seconds, shapes how billions of people understand the world, and sits at the center of a quiet debate about who really controls the news. How did a single railroad accident create this institution? What does a press release actually look like? And what happens when the machine that was built to inform starts to distort?

• 2. Ivy Lee and the First Release

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  Ivy Lee is known as the father of modern public relations, and his October 1906 response to the Atlantic City train wreck is the documented origin of the press release as a formal practice. Fifty people died in that crash. Rather than staying silent or offering a sanitized corporate statement, Lee wrote frankly and gave his observations directly to his fellow reporters.

  The New York Times reproduced his exact words. That decision by a major newspaper to run an organization's own statement verbatim set a precedent that has never really been undone. What Lee understood was that honesty, offered proactively and on the record, could shift the entire dynamic between an institution and the press.

  In the decades since, press releases evolved from a crisis tool into a standard mechanism for disclosure. Companies began issuing them to share statistics, announce milestones, and communicate with journalists, other public relations professionals, and media relations staff across industries.

• 3. Anatomy of a Release

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  A standard press release follows a nine-element structure that public relations professionals treat as a professional format. At the top sits the letterhead or logo, followed by media contact information: name, phone number, email address, and mailing address for the person handling inquiries.

  The headline comes next, designed to grab a journalist's attention and summarize the news in one to six words. Beneath that, a sub-headline called a "dek" expands on the headline in more detail. Then comes the dateline, which states the release date and typically the originating city. If the date on the dateline falls after the day the release was actually sent, that signals a news embargo.

  The introduction answers the basic who, what, when, where, and why in its opening paragraph. The body section follows with statistics, background, and additional detail. A boilerplate provides a short "about" description of the issuing organization. Finally, the close marks the end of the document. In North America, the traditional symbol is "-30-", though the "###" symbol now serves the same function. In other countries, the word "ends" is used instead.

  In terms of length, a press release body typically runs four to five paragraphs and stays within a word count of 400 to 500, though the full document can range anywhere from 300 to 800 words.

• 4. How Releases Travel

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  The traditional distribution route runs through a publicity agency. An organization hires the agency to write and distribute the release to newswires, which then scatter the information to journalists. From there, the story enters public circulation.

  A second model has grown alongside that one: self-distribution. In this approach, organizations send releases directly to media outlets, or they use free and paid distribution services that maintain localized, pre-made media contact lists. The distribution service then delivers the release as-is to selected outlets via email and online channels. Small and medium enterprises, political institutions, and governments all use this route. Constitutional courts in Europe, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the U.S. state supreme courts issue their own self-published releases, which news organizations then use for their reporting.

  In Australia, Medianet became the first local company to offer this kind of distribution service. It has since expanded to include an Australian Media Contacts Database, media release distribution, and media monitoring within a single platform.

• 5. Video and the Digital Shift

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  Some public relations firms produce video news releases, or VNRs, which are pre-taped programs or clips formatted so that television stations can air them without modification. These can take the form of full productions, which cost tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to make. They can also mimic the format of TV news broadcasts, or they can be produced specifically for web distribution.

  A common version involves interviews with film actors, taped on sets at movie studios and decorated with the film's logo, ready to be lifted by entertainment programs. Some broadcast outlets have pushed back on VNRs, citing concerns about public perception and the effect on their own credibility. VNRs can also be converted into podcasts and posted to newswires, and the story's lifespan can be extended by seeding it across what the industry calls "community websites," which journalists and feature writers monitor and comment on.

  The rise of the 24-hour news cycle and the internet reshaped how press releases are written. Editors of online newsletters, for instance, often do not have the staff to rewrite traditional press release prose into print-ready copy, so the releases arrive in a form that can be published close to as-is.

• 6. Embargoes and Trust

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  When a draft or final press release is shared before its intended public release date, it typically carries an embargo: a request that news organizations hold the story until a specified date or time. Embargoes run on professional trust rather than legal force. Unless a journalist has signed a legally binding non-disclosure agreement, there is no legal obligation to honor the embargo.

  Breaking one carries real costs. A journalist who publishes before the embargo lifts risks damaging their relationship with the issuing organization and their professional reputation. News organizations have been blacklisted after violating embargoes. Because of this, publicists are encouraged to share embargoed material only with journalists they know personally or who have demonstrated a willingness to hold information until the designated release time.

  The embargo system reveals something important about how press releases actually function: they depend on an ongoing relationship between the issuing organization and the press, one where both sides have something to gain and something to lose.

• 7. The Costs of Convenience

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  Press releases save money and time on both sides of the exchange. For the organization issuing one, the release packages the story in a usable form. For a news outlet, it eliminates the expense of capturing the news firsthand and reduces the labor of writing from scratch.

  But that convenience comes with structural trade-offs. A press release constrains the format and style of the resulting story. It also frames the subject according to the issuing organization's preferred criteria, not the journalist's independent judgment. In the digital age, pressure on news outlets to publish quickly and continuously has reduced the time available for editing and fact-checking. That pressure pushes outlets toward heavier reliance on pre-packaged releases.

  Any information deliberately sent to a reporter or media source qualifies as a press release the moment it is sent. That broad definition means the category includes pitch letters, media advisories, and other forms of proactive communication from institutions to the press. Ivy Lee's original act of honesty in 1906 became the founding logic of a system that, more than a century later, still shapes what gets reported and how.