When Not to Send a Press Release

The question PR teams are trained to ask is “how do we write this?” The question they should ask first is “should we write this at all?”

Sending a press release that doesn’t warrant one has real costs. It consumes journalist goodwill on an announcement that won’t generate coverage. It establishes a pattern of releasing unremarkable news, which trains journalists to filter your releases into lower priority. And it signals to editors that your team doesn’t distinguish between news and announcements.

When not to send a press release: the five categories that don’t warrant one

Understanding what doesn’t clear the bar is more useful than another list of what does. Here are the five categories that most commonly don’t warrant a press release:

1. Internal milestones repackaged as external news

“We’ve served 1,000 customers” is a milestone. It’s meaningful inside your company. It is not, by itself, news for a journalist or their readers. Unless the number represents a verifiable category leadership position, or is accompanied by data that tells a larger story about market dynamics, milestones of this kind belong in your newsletter and your social channels – not in a journalist’s inbox.

The test: does this fact matter to anyone outside your company? And if so, why?

2. Personnel announcements below senior leadership level

New hire releases for roles that aren’t at C-suite or board level are rarely newsworthy in general media. They can work in trade publications that cover personnel moves as a standard feature – certain financial press outlets, specialist industry publications, or regional business media – but require active vetting before sending. Sending a mid-level hire press release to a national business daily wastes the contact.

3. Repackaged product updates with no new capability

A patch, a redesign, an additional configuration option – these are product updates, not product news. A press release for a minor update trains the journalist that your product releases don’t clear the news threshold. When you have a genuinely significant launch, you’ve already diluted your credibility.

The test: does this update change what a journalist’s reader could do or what they would pay? If not, it’s a changelog entry.

4. Award wins without verifiable significance

Winning “Best SaaS Company in [Category]” from an industry association or a listicle-driven publication doesn’t generate press coverage. Journalists know which awards are peer-adjudicated with genuine prestige and which are pay-to-play or self-submitted. Sending a release about the latter category damages your credibility with editors who recognize the award.

Exception: genuinely recognized industry awards with transparent selection processes, or category wins in broadly recognized rankings.

5. Partnerships that are still mostly theoretical

A partnership announcement that amounts to “two companies agreed to explore opportunities together” should not be a press release. It becomes a release when there is something specific and verifiable: a joint product launch, a co-branded service, a quantified integration, or a distribution agreement with defined terms. Vague partnership announcements without concrete outputs are a frequently abused format.

The signs your press release is a vanity exercise

Beyond categories, there are behavioral signals that a release is being written for internal reasons rather than journalistic ones:

Multiple rounds of senior approval are primarily about tone, not accuracy. If most of the review time is spent softening language, adding adjectives, or removing anything that sounds too direct, the release is being written for the executive team, not for journalists.

The “news” is already known to the market. If the announcement has been covered informally in trade press, leaked to industry blogs, or widely discussed at conferences, a press release isn’t breaking news. Timing a release after the story is already circulating means competing with established coverage rather than generating new interest.

You can’t explain why this is news in one sentence without hedging. “It’s significant because we’re a fast-growing company and this shows our momentum” is not a news reason. “It’s significant because this is the first publicly disclosed partnership between a German Mittelstand logistics software provider and a major global freight forwarder” is a news reason.

The release is timed to a quarterly PR calendar, not to when the news is ready. Forcing a release into a monthly or quarterly production cycle means some releases go out before they’re ready and some news gets delayed past its optimal moment.

What to do instead of a press release

When the news doesn’t warrant a release, there are better formats for communicating it:

LinkedIn and owned channels. Internal milestones, minor product updates, team announcements, award wins – these land well in owned social and company newsletter formats where audiences have already opted in. The engagement rate is often better than press release coverage for news at this level.

Journalist briefings. For news that is significant but better suited to a one-on-one conversation than a formal release, an exclusive briefing with one or two relevant journalists often generates deeper, more accurate coverage than a distribution release. The journalist gets the story first; you get a fully developed piece rather than a brief mention.

Background notes for ongoing conversations. If you’re building relationships with journalists who cover your space, sharing relevant information as background – not for immediate publication – builds credibility over time and positions you as a useful source for future stories.

Trade association announcements. Industry-specific news that matters to practitioners but not to general business media often has the right home in trade publications, trade association newsletters, or sector-specific platforms.

When a press release actually makes sense

To make the line clear from both sides:

A press release earns its place when the news passes a straightforward test: a journalist covering the relevant beat would consider this reportable without needing to be convinced. Signals that this bar is cleared:

• Funding rounds above the typical market threshold for your company stage and sector
• Product launches that create a new capability category, not an incremental improvement
• Research or data that reveals a non-obvious finding about a market or behavior
• Partnerships where both sides are recognizable and the commercial terms are specific
• Leadership hires at C-suite or board level, especially when the person brings specific signal value

The discipline is not being conservative for its own sake. It is being precise – how to write a press release that earns coverage requires starting with news that warrants the format, and press release distribution works better when it’s sending genuinely newsworthy content.

The decision filter

Before writing any press release, run through three questions:

1. Would a journalist covering this beat find it independently reportable, or would they need to be persuaded?
2. Is the news specific enough that a journalist could write the first paragraph of a story from the lead alone?
3. Will this release strengthen or weaken the credibility of the next release you send to the same journalists?

Two or three clear yeses: write the release. Anything less: find a different format or a stronger angle.

The press release is a tool that works best when it is used with restraint. Frequent use of a hammer doesn’t make nails appear.

The list you should also keep

Every press release decision is also a distribution decision. The journalists you send to remember not just individual releases but the overall pattern: does this sender bring real news, or is this inbox noise?

Keeping a short internal record of which releases received coverage and which didn’t is one of the most useful PR discipline tools available. Over time, the pattern reveals what your distribution list actually responds to – and what represents wasted relationship capital. That record, more than any single release decision, drives the quality improvements that make the next send more effective than the last.

For the full press release structure once you’ve confirmed you have news worth sending, how to write a press release covers the format in detail.