Press Release Examples: 4 Formats You Can Copy Today
Summary
The best press release examples share one structure: a headline that states the news, a dateline, a first paragraph answering who, what, when, where and why, a verifiable quote and a short boilerplate. This guide gives four ready-to-adapt press release examples (product launch, funding, event, partnership), explains why 88% of journalists delete pitches that miss their beat, and shows where an AI assistant saves time on drafts and where you must supply the facts yourself.
You have a news item, a blank page and an hour before your manager asks for the draft. The fastest way out is to study press release examples that match your type of news, copy the skeleton, and replace every detail with your own. Below you get four examples (product launch, funding, event, partnership), the structure behind them, and the point where an AI assistant helps or gets in the way.
What do good press release examples have in common?
Strip the names off a dozen releases and they look the same. A headline that states the news. A dateline. A first paragraph that answers who, what, when, where and why. One or two quotes. A short boilerplate. Contact details.
PR Newswire's template guide lists the same building blocks and suggests keeping the headline under 100 characters. That is a ceiling, not a target. Most of the releases that get read run closer to 70.
What changes between a release that gets used and one that gets deleted is not the format. It is the news inside it. We come back to that in the section on journalists.
Four press release examples you can copy
Each one below is a short skeleton for a made-up company. Replace the facts, keep the order.
Example 1: a product launch release
Product launches are the most common format and the easiest to get wrong, because every company thinks its feature is the news. Lead with what the customer can now do, not with what you built.
Fieldnote launches offline mode so field teams can log inspections without signal
DUBLIN, October 8, 2026 - Fieldnote, a mobile inspection app used by 1,200 maintenance teams, today released offline mode. Technicians can now complete and sign inspection forms in basements, tunnels and rural sites, and the app syncs everything once a connection returns.
"Our customers kept telling us they were writing results on paper and retyping them at night," said Aoife Brennan, head of product at Fieldnote. "Offline mode removes the retyping."
Offline mode is available today on all paid plans at no extra cost. Fieldnote has also published a three-page setup guide for teams migrating from paper.
About Fieldnote: Fieldnote makes inspection software for facilities and maintenance teams. It was founded in 2021 and is based in Dublin.
Notice what is missing: no "innovative", no "cutting-edge", no "excited to announce". The second sentence carries the benefit and the third carries the proof (a real use case, a real price). Fieldnote is invented for this article, so swap in your own facts.
Skip this format if the news is a minor update. A bug fix and a color change go in a changelog, not a release.
Example 2: a funding announcement
Funding releases follow a stricter order, because journalists scan for three things: the amount, the lead investor and what the money is for.
Fieldnote raises $4.5 million to bring inspection software to small maintenance firms
DUBLIN, October 8, 2026 - Fieldnote today announced a $4.5 million seed round led by Northgate Capital, with participation from two angel investors. The company will use the funds to hire six engineers and open a support desk for firms with fewer than 50 technicians.
The round follows a year in which active teams grew from 300 to 1,200.
"Small firms were the last to get decent inspection tools," said Brennan. "That is the gap we are going after."
The growth figure does the persuading here. One number a reader can verify beats three paragraphs of vision.
Worth including if: you can name the lead investor and the use of funds. Skip the release if you cannot. A funding story with no amount reads as a rumor.
Example 3: an event announcement
Event releases are about logistics. The reader needs to decide in five seconds whether to attend or send a reporter.
Fieldnote hosts free workshop on replacing paper inspection forms, October 22 in Dublin
DUBLIN, October 8, 2026 - Fieldnote will hold a free two-hour workshop on October 22 at 10:00 a.m. at the Docklands Innovation Hub, covering how maintenance teams move from paper checklists to digital forms without losing audit history.
Three facilities managers will share the checklists they replaced and the mistakes they made. Seats are limited to 60. Registration is open at the event page, and press can request a free pass.
The date, time, place and price sit in the first paragraph. If a journalist has to scroll for the date, the release failed.
Example 4: a partnership release
Partnership releases fail more often than any other type, because two companies agreeing to "work together" is not news. A partnership becomes news when a customer gets something they could not get last week.
Fieldnote and Harbourline connect inspections to repair orders in one click
DUBLIN, October 8, 2026 - Fieldnote and Harbourline, a maintenance scheduling platform, today launched an integration that turns a failed inspection item into a repair order automatically. Shared customers no longer copy findings between two systems.
Early users cut the gap between a failed check and a scheduled repair from several days to the same afternoon, according to Harbourline.
Look at the second paragraph. It names a before and an after. If you cannot write that sentence, you do not have a partnership release yet. You have a logo swap.
Why do journalists ignore most releases?
Relevance. In Muck Rack's State of Journalism 2026 report, based on nearly 1,100 journalists, 86% said at least some of their stories began with a PR pitch, yet 88% immediately delete pitches that miss their beat. Both numbers are true at once.
Read that as a to-do list. A well-formatted release sent to the wrong reporter fails for the same reason a badly formatted one does.
Three habits fix most of it:
Send to five reporters who covered your topic last month, not to a list of 500.
Put a two-sentence pitch in the email body that says why this reporter, why now.
Attach one concrete asset, such as a data table, a customer name or a photo.
Distribution services help once the targeting is right. Platforms such as Cision give you media lists and monitoring, but they cannot fix a release with no news in it.
Where does an AI writing assistant actually help?
Here is the split I use. The assistant is good at the parts of a release that follow a pattern, and weak at the part that decides whether anyone cares.
It helps with:
Turning your notes into a first draft. Paste the facts, ask for the structure from the examples above, and you have something to edit in minutes instead of a blank page.
Tightening headlines. Ask for ten versions under 80 characters, then pick one and rewrite it in your own words.
Producing variants. One release becomes a short email pitch, a LinkedIn post and a version for your newsletter.
Catching filler. Ask it to flag every adjective that does not carry a fact.
It does not help with the news angle, the quote or the customer name. Those have to come from you, because a model will happily invent a plausible quote from a head of product who does not exist. Never let that reach a journalist.
A general chat assistant is enough for a one-off release. If you write several a month, a tool that sits inside your writing app saves the copy-and-paste step.
Grammarly works inside Gmail and Google Docs, which makes it useful for the final pass on tone and typos once the facts are locked.
Jasper is built for marketing teams that want brand voice settings and templates shared across several writers. Whether that is worth the monthly price depends on how many people write for you.
How do you brief an AI so the draft is usable?
Most weak drafts come from weak input. Give the assistant five things and it stops guessing.
The single news sentence, in plain words.
Two or three verifiable facts: a number, a date, a price.
The audience, such as "trade press covering facilities management".
A real quote you already have, word for word.
The format from this article that fits, such as "funding release, 300 words, dateline first".
Then ask for a draft and read it with one question: what here would a reporter be unable to check? Delete or source it.
A rough rule of thumb: the briefing takes about five minutes and the editing another ten. If the draft still needs a full rewrite, the problem was the news, not the tool.
What should you cut before sending?
Every release has a few lines that exist only to make the company feel important. Cut them.
Adjectives with no fact behind them: "leading", "innovative", "world-class".
A second quote that repeats the first.
Background paragraphs longer than the news paragraph.
A boilerplate over 80 words.
Then check the basics. Is the date right? Does every number have a source? Does the contact person answer email? Send the release in the body of the email, not only as an attachment, because many reporters will not open files from people they do not know.
How long should it be, and what do people get wrong?
How long should a press release be?
One page. Roughly 300 to 400 words for the release itself, and 500 only if the news truly needs the room. The four examples above run between 100 and 150 words because they are skeletons, and a real release adds the detail only you have: a customer name, a price list, a pilot result.
If you are past 500 words, you are probably writing two stories. Split them. A funding release that also announces a product and a hire gives the reporter three reasons to skim and none to quote.
Paragraphs stay short, three sentences at most. Reporters often lift a paragraph almost as written, so each one should stand alone without the one before it.
What are the most common format mistakes?
Four mistakes show up again and again when I review releases sent in by small teams.
Burying the news. The first paragraph is about the company's mission. The actual announcement starts in paragraph three.
A headline that is a slogan. "Redefining inspections" tells a reader nothing. "Fieldnote adds offline mode" does.
No dateline or no date. A release with no city and no date looks recycled.
Quotes that nobody would say. "We are thrilled to leverage our robust offering" is not speech. Read each quote aloud, and if it sounds like a brochure, rewrite it with something the speaker really believes, or cut it.
None of these needs a tool to fix. They need one careful read, ideally by someone who did not write the draft.
Which example should you copy first?
Match the format to your news. Launching something customers can use: Example 1. Money raised: Example 2. A date people must attend: Example 3. A joint announcement with a clear customer benefit: Example 4. Anything that fits none of these is probably a blog post, and you should publish it there instead.
Write the headline last, keep the release to one page, and send it to fewer people than you think you should.