7 minute read
Local editors want your news. That surprises most business owners, but it is true: community outlets run on submissions, and many newsrooms are down to a handful of people trying to fill pages every week. The releases they delete are not deleted for being self-promotional. They are deleted for being unusable.
Usable means: a real story, in news format, with a photo, sent the way that outlet accepts news. This guide covers the first three. The fourth is our job.
Start with an actual story
A press release is not an ad with paragraphs. Nobody will publish that you exist and are good at what you do. Editors publish things that happened: you opened, you moved, you hired, you won, you gave, you reached a milestone, you are doing something for the community.
The test is simple: would a neighbor mention it to another neighbor? A new location passes. A seasonal discount does not. A free storm-prep inspection drive for seniors passes easily.
Write the lede like a news story
The first sentence carries who, what, where, and when, written in the third person, as if the outlet's own reporter wrote it. A good lede can be published as-is, and that is the secret: the easier your release is to run unchanged, the more often it runs.
A workable pattern: Business, a what-it-is in city, will do what on date. Then a second sentence with the detail that makes it interesting. Resist the urge to open with how excited you are. Nobody has ever been excited to read that someone is excited.
The structure editors expect
- Headline: plain and factual, under 80 characters, no exclamation points
- Dateline: your city and the date, like SARASOTA, Fla., Nov. 7, 2026
- Lede: who, what, where, when in one sentence
- Body: two to four short paragraphs of detail, most important first
- Quote: one or two sentences from a named person with a title
- Boilerplate: a short standing paragraph about your business
- Contact: a real person, a phone number, an email
Quotes are where the personality goes
Everything outside the quote should read like neutral reporting. The quote is where you get to be human: why this matters to you, what it means for the community, what you are hoping for. Keep it to two sentences and attribute it to a real, named person with a title. Editors cut releases with no quote and distrust releases where the whole text sounds like one.
Send a real photo
Releases with good photos get picked up dramatically more often, because a story with art is easier to publish than a story without it. Good means: high resolution, horizontal, real people or a real place, no logos slapped on top, no stock photography. A phone photo in good light beats a stock image every time.
The mistakes that get releases deleted
- Writing an ad: superlatives, offers, and calls to action instead of a story
- Burying the news in paragraph four
- No date, no location, no contact person
- Attachments the newsroom cannot open, or no photo at all
- Sending the same generic blast to every outlet with no sense of what each one covers
Then it has to get delivered
A perfect release sent to a generic info@ inbox still dies. Every outlet has its own intake: a submission form, a specific editor, a community calendar, a word limit, an image spec. That delivery layer is the unglamorous work PaperRoute PR exists to do, along with proving what ran afterward.
Write the story. We will run the route.
Ready to run your route?