How to Write a Press Release That Journalists Actually Read

The press release is the single most fundamental deliverable in PR — and the one most founders get comprehensively wrong. Not because they lack writing ability, but because everything they've been told about press releases is either outdated, oversimplified, or written by people who have never actually worked in a newsroom.

The result is a predictable failure pattern: a founder spends two hours on a carefully worded announcement, sends it to 200 journalists via a wire service, gets three opens and zero coverage, and concludes that PR doesn't work. The problem isn't the medium. It's the execution.

This guide covers what actually determines whether a press release gets read — and acted on. Not as abstract advice, but as a practical framework for fintech and iGaming founders who need coverage and can't afford to waste their credibility on a badly written announcement.

Why the Inverted Pyramid Isn't Enough

Every PR textbook teaches the inverted pyramid: put the most important information first, then supporting detail, then background. This is structurally correct. It is also not sufficient. The inverted pyramid describes the shape of a press release that gets read through. It says nothing about what determines whether the release gets opened in the first place.

There are two filters every press release has to pass before the inverted pyramid becomes relevant. The first is the subject line — that's the open decision. The second is the first sentence — that's the read-through decision. Most press releases fail at one of these two points, and no amount of well-structured body copy rescues a release that never got opened.

The inverted pyramid also creates a second failure mode: releases that front-load the "what" but bury the "why it matters." A fintech launch announcement that opens with "Company XYZ announces the release of its new payment infrastructure platform" has passed the inverted pyramid test — the news is first. But it hasn't answered the journalist's actual question, which is: why should I care, and who does this affect?

"A journalist isn't reading to be informed. They're reading to decide whether their readers would care. Your press release has about four seconds to make that case."

The Journalist's Inbox Reality

A beat journalist at a fintech publication like Finextra, Sifted, or FinTech Futures receives between 300 and 600 pitches and press releases per week. That is not a number that invites careful reading. It is a number that requires aggressive filtering — which means most releases are deleted on the basis of the subject line alone, without being opened.

The filtering logic is not random. Journalists are optimising for one thing: stories their specific readers will find genuinely useful or interesting. Not stories that are important to the company issuing the release. Not stories that represent a significant company milestone. Stories that connect to what their readers are dealing with, worried about, or trying to understand right now.

This means your press release is competing — every time — not just with other press releases, but with breaking news, exclusives, data releases, regulatory developments, and editorial stories already in the pipeline. The question isn't "is our news interesting?" The question is "is our news interesting to this journalist's specific audience right now?" The more specifically you can answer yes to that question, the higher the open rate.

The implication for how you build and use your media list is significant. A release sent to 500 journalists in a bulk blast will almost always underperform a release sent to 20 carefully selected journalists with personalised subject lines and a clear understanding of why the story fits their beat. Volume is not a strategy. Relevance is.

The Anatomy of a Press Release That Gets Opened

The following is a breakdown of the structural components that determine whether a press release works — not just in theory, but in practice, across the fintech and iGaming press coverage I've been involved in building over the past several years.

The Template You Can Use Today

The following is the structural framework Silver Saluri uses for client press releases across fintech and iGaming announcements. Copy the structure, fill in the specifics, and strip any language that sounds like it was written for a marketing brochure rather than a journalist's inbox.

Total length target: 400–600 words. Not longer. A press release that requires scrolling past 600 words will rarely be read in full. If you have more to say, put it in the supporting materials (product deck, data sheet, exec bio) and link to them.

The Five Most Common Mistakes

1. Writing for your investors, not for journalists. "We are transforming the future of embedded finance" is language designed to excite an investor in a pitch deck. To a journalist, it's meaningless. Strip every sentence that couldn't be confirmed with a specific example, a number, or a customer reference.

2. Burying the actual news. The paragraph three problem: the genuinely newsworthy detail appears in the third or fourth paragraph because the first two are spent on company background or "context setting." Journalists don't get to paragraph three. Move the news to paragraph one, sentence one.

3. Sending without assets. A press release with no supporting materials — no product screenshot, no headshot of the spokesperson, no data to support the claims — creates friction. Journalists who want to cover the story now have to email back and wait. Speed matters in any media situation. Include a media kit link or a Google Drive folder with assets attached to every release.

4. Ignoring the embargo correctly. Embargoes work when you have a genuine exclusive to offer — and when you brief a journalist under embargo, you're making them a partner in the story, not just a recipient. Embargoes sent to 50 people simultaneously are not embargoes; they're time-delayed bulk sends. Use embargoes selectively, for Tier 1 targets, with at least 48 hours notice and a clear reason why the journalist's readers should care about getting this first.

5. Treating the distribution as the strategy. Sending a press release is not PR. Press releases are tools for communicating news to journalists who already know who you are, or who have a specific reason to care about your sector. Sent cold, without context, to a journalist who has never heard of you, a press release has about the same effect as a cold email with no subject line. The distribution decision — wire blast vs. targeted outreach — is where most startup PR budgets are wasted.

Wire Service vs. Targeted Pitching: Where Your Budget Actually Goes

The wire service pitch is the default choice for many startups because it feels like scale. Pay €300–800 per release, hit 1,000+ journalists, track opens and impressions. The problem: journalists who receive wire releases treat them as a commodity stream, not as a source of story ideas. Open rates on wire distributions for startup announcements typically run under 5%. Actual coverage conversion — the number of pieces that appear as a direct result of the wire send — is often zero.

Compare that to targeted pitching: 20 journalists who cover your specific beat, in your specific geography, at publications your target audience actually reads. Each one receives a personalised email, subject line written for their specific beat, with the press release attached or linked rather than pasted in full. This approach takes more time. It also produces materially better results — not just in coverage volume, but in the quality and relevance of coverage that appears.

The ROI calculation is not close. For an iGaming operator announcing a new licensing milestone or a fintech company announcing a Series A, targeted outreach to 20 relevant journalists will consistently outperform a 2,000-journalist wire blast — both in total coverage pieces and in the quality of the outlets where coverage appears. Use wire services for the SEO and syndication benefit (wire picks do show up in Google News), but do not treat the wire send as your primary distribution strategy.

For founders deciding whether to manage this themselves or work with a PR consultant, the honest answer is: the writing is learnable. The relationships are not. What boutique PR agencies actually provide is not the ability to write a press release — it's a maintained media list, active journalist relationships in your specific sector, and the judgment to know which story lands where and when. You can write a strong press release. You cannot replicate a five-year relationship with the fintech desk at Sifted.

The final point: a well-written press release sent to the wrong journalists, at the wrong time, with no prior relationship, will still underperform. The press release is the deliverable. The PR strategy is the context it sits inside — the narrative you've been building, the relationships you've been maintaining, the outcomes you've defined as success before you hit send.