The Real Reason Journalists Delete Your Press Release Without Reading It

Picture a press release with the subject line “Exciting News From [Business Name]!!” It opens with three sentences about how proud the founder is, moves on to a paragraph of company history, and buries the actual announcement, a new product line, in paragraph four. It took the better part of a Saturday to write, and it’s unlikely to earn a single story.

The problem there is news judgement, and it’s the one thing AI tools don’t fix on their own, no matter how good the prompt is. According to Muck Rack’s State of Journalism 2026 report, based on responses from 897 journalists surveyed between 30 January and 2 March 2026, 88 per cent said they immediately discard pitches that fall outside their beat. Almost half said they rarely receive pitches that actually match what they cover. That’s a US-heavy sample, so treat it as directional for Australian newsrooms rather than an exact local figure.

This post is a workflow for writing press releases that survive that first glance, what they cost to distribute in Australia, where AI genuinely helps, and where it can quietly wreck your credibility if you let it write unsupervised.

What Makes a Press Release Actually Newsworthy?

A press release is newsworthy when it contains a genuine change, timeliness, or public relevance, not simply when something has happened in your business. Editors and journalists judge stories against recognised news values: is it new, does it affect a specific audience, does it involve numbers or data, conflict, or a person readers will care about. If your release doesn’t hit at least two of those, it’s a notice, not news.

Most small business “news” fails this test in one specific way: it’s true and it’s tidy, but it isn’t different from what happened last month. A new staff member, a website refresh, an anniversary, these are real events but they rarely clear the bar on their own. What does clear it is the same event framed against a trend, a number, or a problem your audience already has. “We hired a new operations manager” is a notice. “We hired our fifth staff member this year as regional demand for [X] outpaces supply” is closer to news, because it’s evidence of something bigger than your business.

The fix isn’t better adjectives. It’s asking, before you write a word, what a stranger who doesn’t know your business would find useful or surprising about this. If the honest answer is “nothing much,” that’s worth knowing before you spend a Saturday on it.

The 90-Minute AI Workflow for a Press Release That Might Actually Get Read

Here’s the process, broken into steps with realistic time estimates. Budget close to two hours the first time you do it and closer to an hour once the structure is familiar.

Step 1: Newsworthiness diagnostic (10–15 minutes). Before drafting anything, test the story. Open Claude or ChatGPT and use a prompt like this one, filling in your own details:

“I’m considering a press release about [describe the event in one sentence]. Acting as a sceptical news editor, tell me honestly whether this is newsworthy enough for a general business journalist, which news value it hits hardest (timeliness, data, human interest, conflict, proximity), and what’s missing if it’s currently just a company update rather than a story.”

Read the answer critically. If the tool tells you it’s thin, believe it, and go find the number, the trend, or the third-party voice that gives it weight before you draft.

Step 2: Build the skeleton (10 minutes). Press releases follow the inverted pyramid: the most important fact first, supporting detail second, background and boilerplate last. Write five bullet points before you write a sentence: the headline fact, the “so what,” a supporting statistic or example, one quote from a named person, and the practical detail (availability, dates, pricing).

Step 3: Draft with AI, using your facts (20–30 minutes). Feed the tool your five bullets and ask it to draft in AP-style inverted pyramid structure, under 400 words, no adjectives it can’t attribute to a source. A workable prompt:

“Using only the facts I give you below, write a 350–400 word press release in inverted pyramid structure: headline, dateline, lead paragraph with the core news, supporting paragraph with data or context, one quote from [name, title], a paragraph on practical details, and a one-paragraph boilerplate about the business. Don’t add any fact, statistic, or adjective I haven’t given you. Flag anywhere you think a claim needs a source.”

That last instruction matters more than any other line in the prompt. It’s the difference between a draft you can fact-check quickly and one where a plausible-sounding but invented statistic slips through. The wider approach to briefing AI is covered in How to Brief AI Like a PR Professional.

Step 4: Fact-check every claim (15–20 minutes). Read the draft against your original five bullets, line by line. Anything the model added that wasn’t in your source material gets cut or verified. This is the step people skip when they’re in a hurry, and it’s the one that causes the actual damage if a journalist or a reader catches a number that doesn’t hold up.

Step 5: Cut the enthusiasm (10–15 minutes). AI drafts, and honestly most human first drafts, default to language that reads as marketing rather than news: “excited to announce,” “proud to unveil,” “game-changing.” Strip it. Journalists write around press releases, not from them, and a release that reads like straight news copy is more likely to survive that editing.

Step 6: Send or distribute (15–30 minutes, depending on method). Covered in the cost section below.

What NOT to Do When You Hand a Press Release to AI

A few patterns worth calling out specifically.

Don’t confuse a press release with a pitch. A press release should stand alone as a story, written in third person, with no direct ask. If what you actually have is “would you be interested in covering this,” write a short pitch email instead and save the release for something genuinely self-contained. Mixing the two formats confuses journalists and reads as inexperience.

Don’t let AI invent a quote. It’s fast to generate a convincing sentence attributed to your CEO that your CEO never said. Every quote in the release should be something a real person actually said or approved, not something that sounds like what they’d say.

Don’t blanket-send to a purchased list. Whether you’re using a paid wire or your own spreadsheet, sending an irrelevant release to a journalist outside their beat is exactly the behaviour that produces the 88 per cent instant-discard rate from the Muck Rack data above. A shorter, better-targeted list outperforms a longer, generic one.

Don’t skip the boilerplate and media contact block. It sounds minor, but a release with no named contact, phone number, or one-paragraph “About [Business]” section signals it wasn’t prepared properly, and it makes it harder for a time-poor journalist to follow up.

How Much Does It Cost to Distribute a Press Release in Australia?

Distributing a press release in Australia costs nothing if you send it yourself to a targeted media list, or from roughly $137.50 AUD per release through a paid wire service, up to several hundred dollars a month for an ongoing subscription. The right choice depends on how often you’re sending releases and how much your own media list already covers.

AAP Medianet, Australia’s main press release wire, lists a Pay-Per-Release option “starting from $125 + GST” per release (so $137.50 AUD once GST is added), with the final cost depending on which of its 200-plus journalist and outlet lists you select, according to Medianet’s own pricing page. Its Essentials subscription runs $350 AUD a month for 500 distribution emails, 150 contact exports and two user seats; the Advance tier is $690 AUD a month for higher volume, per Medianet’s plans page, both checked in September 2026.

The alternative is building your own targeted list of 15 to 30 relevant journalists and sending directly. It costs nothing but your own time to build and maintain, and it’s often more effective than a scattergun wire send, because you’re only reaching people whose beat genuinely matches your story. I’ve written separately about building that list without an expensive database, using AI to speed up the research rather than a paid tool.

On top of distribution, budget for the AI subscription doing the drafting. Claude Pro and ChatGPT Plus are both listed at USD $20 a month on their providers’ own pricing pages, checked in September 2026, so expect a little more once currency conversion and card fees are applied. If you’d rather not manage the tool, the prompts, and the fact-checking yourself, AI-Stories is one option, from $29 + GST a month.

DIY List, Paid Wire, or a Managed Service: Comparing the Options

Sending it yourself to a list you’ve built and maintained is the cheapest option and, for most small businesses with a genuinely newsworthy story, often the most effective, because targeting beats reach. The catch is time: building and keeping a useful list current takes a few hours up front and regular upkeep, and there’s no guarantee anyone opens the email regardless of how well-targeted it is.

A paid wire like Medianet buys you reach into hundreds of outlets and a level of legitimacy, some smaller regional outlets and databases do pick up wire content automatically, that a cold email doesn’t have. It’s a reasonable option for a genuinely national announcement, a funding round, a significant hire, a product recall, where broad reach matters more than a handpicked list. It’s a poor fit for routine business updates; you’re paying $137.50 or more to reach hundreds of journalists who, per the data above, will mostly delete anything outside their beat immediately.

A managed service sits between the two: someone else runs the newsworthiness check, the drafting, the fact-checking and the targeted send, for a monthly fee rather than a big one-off tool subscription plus your own hours. It suits businesses that want the discipline of the workflow above without doing it themselves every time a story comes up.

Can AI Write a Press Release for a Small Business?

Yes, AI can draft a structurally sound press release quickly, but only from facts, quotes and data you supply yourself; it cannot judge whether your story is actually newsworthy, and it will confidently invent details if you let it. Treat it as a fast typist working from your notes, not as the person deciding what’s worth writing about.

The quality gap between an AI-assisted release and a purely human-written one has mostly closed on structure and grammar. It hasn’t closed on judgement. A model doesn’t know that a competitor announced something similar last week, that your industry’s trade press is currently focused on a different story, or that the “exciting” framing you asked for reads as tone-deaf given what’s happening in the news that day. Those calls still sit with a person who’s paying attention.

What AI Can’t Do for Your Press Release

It can’t tell you whether today is a bad day to send it. A genuinely good story can still land badly because a bigger news event is dominating every outlet’s attention that week; that’s a judgement call based on what’s happening in the world right now, which a model has no reliable view of.

It can’t build the relationship that gets your email opened in the first place. Journalists cover businesses they’ve heard of, whose previous releases were accurate, and whose contact replies promptly and honestly when asked a follow-up question. That reputation is built over months of real interactions, not generated by a better subject line.

It can’t verify your own facts. Current pricing, staff numbers, award status, industry rankings, anything the model wasn’t explicitly given, it will sometimes fill the gap with something plausible rather than flag the gap. That’s on whoever reviews the draft, every time.

It can’t guarantee coverage. No tool, paid wire, or workflow can promise a journalist will write about you. What the process above does is remove the reasons a release gets deleted before it’s even read; the story itself still has to earn the rest. If a release goes out and gets silence, The Media Pitch Follow-Up covers what to do next.