A press release is one of the few documents a company publishes that it cannot revise afterwards. Once it is out, it sits in the public record, gets picked up by databases, quoted by analysts and archived by search engines. The standard it has to clear is therefore higher than for most corporate writing, and most companies do not apply one.
The first test is whether every claim can be defended. Numbers should have a source. Achievements should be measurable. Words such as largest, first and leading should either be true and documented or removed. Asking, sentence by sentence, whether a claim could be challenged produces a tighter and more credible release, and it avoids the correction that becomes a story in itself.
The second test is voice. The release should sound like the company. Most of them adopt a generic register full of cautious verbs and abstract nouns, arranged in three-sentence paragraphs that say very little. A release written in the company's own voice is more useful to a reader and reflects better on whoever issued it.
The third test is restraint. Most releases say more than they need to, with a subheading that repeats the headline, a quotation that adds nothing and boilerplate longer than the news. Cutting to the material that is actually needed, which is often a third of the first draft, produces something people will read to the end.
The fourth test is timing. A release issued because something has genuinely happened earns attention. One issued to fill a schedule earns scepticism, and the scepticism attaches to the next release as well. Companies that publish only when there is something to say build credit slowly, and companies that publish on a calendar spend it.
There is a fifth test that is easy to forget, which is whether the release will still read well in five years. The archive is permanent, and a document that seemed measured at the time can look boastful with hindsight. Writing as though a future reader will have the benefit of knowing what happened next is a useful corrective.
Our own standard is described on the press and media centre page. Every release is checked against the record and signed off before publication, we do not issue them on a schedule, and the test is whether we would be comfortable defending each sentence years later. That is why there are not many of them.
It is worth saying what a release is for, because the answer shapes everything above. It is a record, not an advertisement. Its readers are journalists deciding whether there is a story, counterparties checking a fact, and, years later, anyone doing their own research on the business. Writing for those three audiences produces a document that is shorter, plainer and far more useful than one written to impress.
A last practical note on process. Somebody who did not write the release should read it before it goes out, with a single instruction, which is to mark every sentence that could be challenged. That takes ten minutes and prevents most of the problems that otherwise take months to correct.
