What Is a Press Release? Format, Purpose, and Examples

What is a press release? The definition, what one looks like on the page, length norms, the ### end mark, third-person rules, and where releases get published.

Ask "what is a press release" and the honest short answer fits in one sentence: an official written statement that an organization issues in its own name, formatted so that newsrooms, markets, and databases can quote it, verify it, and republish it. It is the organization speaking on the record — not a journalist's account of the organization, not a pitch, not an ad — and every odd convention of the form follows from that on-the-record job.

We read these documents at industrial volume. PPN World monitors 1,200+ feeds from 80+ newswires and official sources across 190+ countries — thousands of releases on a busy day — and at that volume the form's uniformity stops looking like habit and starts looking like engineering. The headline, the dateline, the tight body, the attributed quote, the boilerplate, the ### at the bottom: each element survives because some reader, terminal, or regulator depends on it.

What follows is the definitional tour: what press releases are and what they're used for, what one looks like on the page, how long they run and why, where the strange end marks came from, and where releases actually get published and read.

What is a press release, exactly?#

Three properties make a document a press release rather than some other kind of corporate text:

1. It's official. It goes out in the organization's name, and the organization is accountable for every word. For public companies that accountability is legal — a material misstatement in a release isn't spin, it's a securities problem.
2. It's fixed text. A release is written to be quoted verbatim. That's why the wires deliver it full-text and unedited (see what a newswire is), and why the conventions below all optimize for being lifted into someone else's story intact.
3. It's distributed. A statement sitting in a drawer isn't a release. The document is made broadly available at a chosen moment — on a wire, a newsroom page, a regulator's system — which gives it a timestamp and makes it citable as the record.

What are press releases used for in practice? The recurring jobs: product and company launches, funding rounds, mergers and acquisitions, quarterly earnings, executive appointments, regulatory and legal disclosures, government and agency announcements, partnerships, events, and crisis statements. The mix skews more procedural than outsiders expect — a large share of any day's wire is disclosure that had to be published, not marketing that wanted to be.

One framing to keep: a press release is a primary source, not journalism. It says what the issuer wants said, within the bounds of law. That doesn't make it false — it makes it advocacy on the record, the upstream document that coverage is built from and should be checked against.

What do press releases look like on the page?#

Whatever the industry or language, the page runs top to bottom in a nearly invariant order:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE              <- or an embargo line

Headline in Title Case
Optional one-line subheadline

CITY, Country - August 11, 2026 -  <- the dateline
Lede paragraph: who did what, when,
where, and why it matters, in
30-40 words.

Two to four supporting paragraphs
in descending order of importance,
with one or two attributed quotes.

About [Organization]               <- the boilerplate
One standing paragraph on who the
issuer is.

Media contact: name, email, phone

###                                <- the end mark

A few of these deserve a word:

• The headline carries almost the entire burden of getting the release read; desks decide in seconds. We've written separately on headlines journalists actually open.
• The dateline — city and date ahead of the first sentence — declares where and when the news is from, a newspaper convention the form inherited.
• The body follows the inverted pyramid: the most important facts first, detail in descending order, so the story survives being cut from the bottom — or, in the modern version, survives a reader who only skims the first paragraph. Which is most readers.
• The boilerplate is the standing "About us" paragraph near the bottom, identical from release to release; it has its own craft and its own guide.
• The contact block is load-bearing: a release with no reachable human is a story a journalist can't advance.

We're describing here, not teaching. For how to write each part well, see the anatomy of a great press release; for ready-to-adapt skeletons by announcement type, the template collection.

Why press releases are important — and why organizations write them#

For the issuer, a release does three things nothing else does as cleanly. It creates the record: one canonical, timestamped text of what was announced, which is what you want quoted instead of rumor or paraphrase. It discharges disclosure duties: securities regimes require material corporate news to reach the whole market broadly and at once, and a wire release is the standard instrument. And it scales the announcement: the same text reaches every desk, terminal, and database simultaneously, with no reporter having to be individually convinced first.

For readers, releases matter because they're early and on the record. The agency story about an acquisition is typically written from the release announcing it; the release moved first. Journalists, analysts, IR teams, and newsletter writers read the wires precisely because the upstream document beats the downstream coverage — often by hours.

What a release won't do also deserves mention. It won't generate coverage by existing — news value does that — and it isn't an SEO tactic: wire links are nofollow, and syndicated copies get canonicalized or deduplicated by search engines. Write one when you need the record, the reach, or the compliance; skip it when all you want is links.

How long should a press release be?#

The norm is 400–500 words — roughly one page — and it isn't an aesthetic preference, it's a price. Commercial wires advertise a rate that covers about 400–500 words and then bill overages per additional 100 words, typically $100–$250 each (we break the full economics down in what distribution really costs). Decades of that meter have trained the entire form: wire copy reads tight because loose costs money.

How long are press releases in practice? A standard corporate announcement fits the one-page norm; earnings and other financial releases run longer because the disclosure needs its tables; government releases are often shorter still. If your draft sits at 1,200 words, that's not a style question — it's a budgeting decision, and usually a sign the text is doing work that belongs in a backgrounder or on the newsroom page.

Why do press releases end with ### (and sometimes -30-)?#

The three centered pound signs — ### — mean exactly one thing: the release ends here. In the era of typed pages and faxes, the mark told an editor no sheet was missing; on today's wires it still bounds the official text. Anything below it — notes to editors, contact details in some house styles — is annotation, not release.

The mark descends from -30-, the number journalists typed at the end of copy for more than a century. The most-cited origin story traces it to telegraph-era number codes in which 30 signaled the end of a transmission; other explanations circulate, and historians have never fully settled it. What is settled is the practice: -30- meant "end of story" in the newsroom, press releases adopted the convention, and ### became the standard in PR usage — with -30- still common, notably in Canadian and government releases.

Use one or the other, centered, at the end. It's the cheapest credibility signal in the whole form: omitting it confuses no machine, but it tells a trained reader you don't know the format.

Third person, pictures, and the other conventions#

Should a press release be written in third person?

Yes — this one is close to absolute. The organization refers to itself by name ("Acme announced today…"), not as "we," and first person appears only inside quoted statements. The reason is mechanical: release text is written to be lifted verbatim into coverage, and third-person sentences survive the lift. "We're thrilled" can't appear unquoted in a news story; "Acme said" can. The quotes are where the humanity is allowed — that's the assigned slot for voice, opinion, and "we."

English-language releases in North America also broadly follow AP style, for the same lift-ready reason: it's the style the receiving newsrooms already write in.

Do press releases have pictures?

Commonly, yes — and increasingly by default. Product shots, executive headshots, logos, charts, and links to video or b-roll travel with releases, and multimedia gives a desk publishable art without an extra request. On the commercial wires, each asset is a paid add-on — typically $200–$400 per image — so economics rather than format limit how much art moves. On your own newsroom page, attachments are free, which is one reason the fullest version of a release usually lives there.

Where are press releases published?#

There are four canonical homes, and most releases live in several at once:

1. The wires. Paid distribution networks — PR Newswire, Business Wire, GlobeNewswire, and dozens of national services — carry the release to media, terminals, and databases simultaneously. This is the channel newsrooms treat as the official feed; where to send a press release covers the issuer's side of that choice.
2. The issuer's own newsroom. The /news or /press section of the corporate site, ideally with an RSS feed — the canonical copy, free and permanent.
3. Regulators and exchanges. For listed companies, material releases also land in filing systems — the SEC's EDGAR in the US, with equivalents elsewhere — where they become part of the regulatory record.
4. Syndication. Hundreds of automated copies across news sites and portals — wide, shallow, and mostly unread by humans.

Where do readers actually encounter them? Rarely at any of those front doors. In practice, releases reach people through the layers built on top — financial terminals, monitoring platforms, aggregators, and alerts. That reading layer is what we build: PPN World pulls 1,200+ wire and official feeds into one live, deduplicated stream, browsable by source, with story clustering, AI summaries, and saved-search alerts; how to find press releases walks through the free and paid ways in. And if your organization publishes releases by RSS, /submit lists your feed in our public directory for free, after human review.

FAQ#

What are press releases used for?

Announcing news on the record: launches, funding, M&A, earnings, executive changes, regulatory disclosures, government announcements, and crisis statements. A release creates one canonical, timestamped, quotable text of an announcement — and for public companies it is often how a legal disclosure duty gets discharged rather than a marketing choice.

How long should a press release be?

About 400–500 words — roughly one page. The norm is economic rather than aesthetic: wire pricing covers 400–500 words and bills overages per additional 100 words, so tight copy is cheaper copy. Financial releases run longer because the numbers are the disclosure.

Why do press releases end with ###?

Three centered pound signs mark the end of the release, so a reader knows no text is missing. The mark descends from -30-, journalism's traditional end-of-story sign-off, whose origin is most often traced to telegraph codes in which 30 meant end of transmission — a story historians still debate, unlike the practice itself.

Should a press release be written in third person?

Yes. The organization refers to itself by name, and first person lives only inside quoted statements — because release text is written to be lifted verbatim into news copy, and third-person sentences survive the lift.

Do press releases have pictures?

Often, yes: logos, product shots, headshots, and video links commonly travel with a release and give newsrooms publishable art without an extra request. On commercial wires each image is a paid add-on — typically $200–$400 — so budget, not format, is what limits the multimedia.