How to write a press release a wire will accept

A release a wire will accept reports an event — a launch, a raise, a contract, a senior hire, a result — in a headline under 120 characters, an opening paragraph of 40 to 60 words saying who did what and when, then the evidence, one quote from one named person, a boilerplate and a contactable human. Keep it between 250 and 1,200 words — the band we accept — and know that on the legacy wires the same length is also a price: PR Newswire's 2024 domestic card charges $1,020 for 400 words on US1 National and $325 for each additional 100. And write it so it still works with the links stripped out, which is what happens to them on much of this network.

Most advice about writing a press release is written by people who have never read one after it published. The copy that clears a wire's editorial desk and the copy that reads well on the page it lands on are not quite the same thing, and the gap is where the useful rules live.

What counts as news

An announcement needs an event. A launch, a funding round, a partnership, a product, a result, a contract, a filing, a senior hire, a milestone with a number attached. Anything else is a company describing itself, which editors decline and readers ignore.

The test: can a stranger read your first two sentences and restate what happened, in their own words, without using "leading", "innovative" or "solutions"? If they can, you have a release. If they cannot, you have a brochure, and distribution will not convert one into the other.

A second test worth applying before you write: would this sentence still be true in six months? Published releases persist. We opened one from February 2026 that was still live and unchanged in late August. Anything phrased as "now" or "soon" ages badly on a page that outlives the news.

On the legacy wires, word count is a price

There the word count matters because it is the unit they bill in. PR Newswire's 2024 domestic card prices its US1 National circuit at $1,020 for 400 words and $325 for each additional 100. Its regional circuits run $715 plus $205 per 100. 24-7PressRelease caps its PR Newswire national tier at 375 words. ACCESS Newswire goes the other way and advertises unlimited words and images with no multimedia fees across its $475, $865 and $1,205 tiers.

Write to 400 and you are inside nearly every one of those tiers without paying an overage. The full spread of what those tiers cost is worth having open while you decide how long the piece should be.

Ours is not a price at all. Our packages take 250 to 1,200 words and include one image, printed on the package, with no per-hundred charge on top of it. The band is a gate rather than a meter: under 250 and over 1,200 are both refused at submission, and nothing in between costs more than anything else. Most releases still want to sit near the bottom of it, because density is what carries a headline, an event, a piece of evidence, a quote, a company description and a contact block past a reader who is skimming.

The shape

Word budgets that add up to about 380.

Two of those repay extra attention. The quote is where most releases waste 60 words on a chief executive being pleased. A quote that explains why the company made a decision, or what was hard about it, survives being read by a journalist. The contact block is not filler either: it is reprinted verbatim on the published page, and several wires check it. EIN Presswire requires crypto and NFT issuers to show "contact information and postal address" on the website or social pages before it will distribute at all, and Newsfile lists "incomplete or lack of credible contact information" as a stated reason for refusal.

Write it so it survives losing its links

This is the part most guides get wrong. The standard advice — pick your anchor text carefully, place three deep links into the body — assumes your links arrive intact, and that they count for something when they do. On a large part of this network neither holds. Google's guidance on qualifying outbound links is explicit that links marked sponsored, ugc or nofollow "will generally not be followed", and its spam policies treat paid links without one of those values as link spam — which is precisely why publishers apply them to syndicated copy by default. Why almost every press link is nofollow covers the mechanism.

• On OpenPR, the article body carried zero anchor tags. The client's website appeared in the contact block as plain, unclickable text.
• On Digital Journal, one release had no external anchors at all, and another routed its only outbound links through a redirect carrying nofollow.
• On Barchart, Street Insider and CoinMarketCap, every client link carried rel="nofollow".
• On TechBullion, a business release carried a real dofollow link, while a crypto release from the same period carried rel="sponsored", which passes no credit.

The catalogue records which outlet did which, and says "Unconfirmed" where we have not read one off a live page.

So write for a reader who cannot click. Put your company name and product name in the headline. Spell your domain out as words in the body at least once, so it survives being stripped to plain text. Do not build a sentence whose meaning depends on the reader following a link, because on several of these pages there is no link to follow.

Write it for the page it lands on

Your release will not be styled as your article. On the financial terminals we opened, the byline slot is filled by the distributing wire's name rather than a journalist or the company. A "Press Release" chip sits above the headline. Every release in the section shares an identical template, so the page reads as inventory. That chip is doing regulatory work as well as editorial work: the FTC's native advertising guidance turns on whether commercial content is "readily identifiable to consumers as an ad", and the label is how a publisher settles that question. What separates a paid page from an earned one goes through the other four markers.

The neighbours matter too. On the day we checked, one terminal's press-release feed carried a garage-door repair company, a second garage-door repair company and an AI imaging product, in sequence. A sector blog's front page was dense with crypto presale headlines. Your headline is doing all of the work of distinguishing a serious announcement from that, which is an argument for specificity rather than volume: a headline naming a customer, a number or a jurisdiction reads as different in a way that "revolutionises" never will.

Expect the same text to appear at several URLs on the same day — we verified one release published verbatim on two outlets within hours. Search engines pick one copy as canonical, and you do not get to choose which. The others are citations, which is what most of the value is: a page you can point at, and one that an AI assistant reading about your company can quote.

The claims that trigger a review

Anything specific and checkable is safer than anything sweeping and vague. Wires that run compliance reviews — 24-7PressRelease names cloud mining, staking and yield offers, speculative NFTs and trading bots — can ask for government photo ID, incorporation documents, a matching WHOIS record and proof of licensing. Newsfile requires crypto assets to be listed on CoinMarketCap as a Tracked Listing or ICO before it will distribute, and bars "promises of profit/revenue/income" outright. The full map of what gets refused, and by whom, is the companion to this piece.

Practical rules that keep you out of that queue:

• Every number carries its source inside the sentence. "Up 40% year on year, from $2.1M to $2.9M in audited revenue" survives a challenge. "Explosive growth" invites one.
• No price predictions, no multiples, no returns. Presale copy promising a specific gain is the single fastest route to a rejection in the financial and crypto tiers.
• No superlatives you cannot attribute. "First" and "largest" need a named source and a date.
• Name a real person, with a real email address on the company's own domain.

The last check before you send

• One sentence, out loud, on what happened. If it takes two, cut the release back until it takes one.
• Word count between 250 and 1,200.
• Headline under 120 characters, with the company name in it.
• One quote, one named person, saying something specific.
• Contact block with a human, an email, a phone number and a city.
• Company website live, and telling the same story as the release.
• Every number sourced in the sentence that contains it.