Press releases attract folklore. Spend any time around marketing and you will collect a set of confident claims about them — some flattering, some dismissive, most repeated so often that they have hardened into received wisdom. Businesses plan campaigns, set budgets and judge results against these claims, which is a problem, because a good number of them are wrong. Worse, several are wrong in the expensive direction: they promise outcomes nobody controls, or dismiss a useful tool for failing at jobs it was never meant to do.

This article works through ten common press release myths, one at a time, and puts the honest truth in place of each. A word about method before we start: the truth is sometimes “partly”. Where the real answer depends on the story, the outlet or the budget, the article says so and says what it depends on — swapping one absolute claim for its opposite would just be a new myth with better manners.

Myth 1: Sending a Release Means You’ll Be Covered

This is the most commercially convenient myth and the most plainly false. Distribution is a delivery mechanism: it puts your release in front of newsrooms and publishes it on a network of sites. Coverage — a journalist independently deciding your story deserves their audience’s attention — is an editorial judgement, and no distributor, agency or tool controls it. Anyone who folds the two into a single promise is selling you something they do not own.

The honest version is less tidy and more useful. A genuinely newsworthy release, sent to the right desks, earns coverage often enough that the practice is well worth doing — but “often enough” is a tendency, not a transaction. Whether any individual release gets covered depends on the strength of the story, the other news competing that day, and the fit with the outlet’s audience. Plan around the tendency. Never budget around a certainty that does not exist.

Myth 2: Press Releases Are Dead

The press release has been declared dead at regular intervals for about twenty years, usually by someone selling its replacement. What actually died is the ritual that once surrounded the format: the printed release faxed to a newsroom, and the expectation that sending one constituted a public relations strategy. The document itself adapted. Releases are now published online, carry images and video, and are read directly by customers, partners and searchers as well as by the journalists they were always written for.

Meanwhile, newsrooms still work from releases every day, because the format answers their needs precisely: the facts in one place, quotes that can be lifted, a named contact, all of it on the record. So it depends what “dead” is claimed to mean. As a standalone strategy — write, send, wait for fame — the press release was never alive. As the standard written form of a company announcement, it is in routine daily use, and reports of its death remain a genre of marketing rather than a description of reality.

Myth 3: One Release Is Enough

Occasionally, one release is enough — when the news is genuinely large, a single announcement can carry a story a long way. But that is the exception that proves the rule. The ordinary mechanics of PR are cumulative. Journalists cover organisations they have come to recognise. A public record builds up announcement by announcement. Each release teaches the media, and the market, a little more about what your organisation does and why it matters — and that accumulated familiarity is what later coverage is built on.

Judging the format by a single attempt mistakes the nature of the tool. One release is a sentence; a programme of them is an argument. Whether you need the argument depends on what you are trying to become known for, and over how long — but writing off press releases because the first one did not transform the business is like writing off exercise because of one visit to the gym.

Myth 4: Only Big Companies Get Covered

Journalists are not short of big-company material; they are short of stories their audiences care about. Most audiences are local or specialist, and the local and trade media in particular are actively looking for news from the smaller organisations in their patch — covering them is the job. The currency of coverage is newsworthiness: novelty, consequence, human interest, relevance to the reader. None of those is denominated in company size. A twelve-person firm doing something genuinely first, useful or unusual in its field has a story; a multinational announcing a minor internal reshuffle often does not.

The honest qualification is that size does bring structural advantages — name recognition, dedicated PR staff, relationships built over years — and a famous name lowers the bar for routine announcements. Big brands also face higher bars elsewhere, and far harder scrutiny when things go wrong. But for the kinds of stories most smaller companies will ever announce, the deciding variable is the story’s fit with an outlet’s audience, and fit is winnable at any size.

Myth 5: A Press Release Directly Improves Your Google Rankings

It does not, and the mechanism is a matter of public record rather than opinion. Links placed inside distributed releases typically carry nofollow or sponsored attributes and are discounted by search engines, which have long treated press-release links as promotional — closer to advertising than to independent editorial endorsement. A distributed release can create genuine online visibility: copies published on news sites, a more current set of results when people search your company’s name, readers arriving from the places that carried the story. Visibility and ranking position are different things, and marketing that blurs them is marketing to distrust.

Our article on the SEO press release service goes through the whole question — what distribution honestly does for search visibility and where the line sits — in full. The nuance worth keeping here is the direction of cause: if a strong story earns genuine editorial coverage, that is the story’s achievement. It is not a ranking mechanism that distribution supplies, and it cannot be packaged or promised.

Myth 6: Longer Releases Are More Impressive

Length is not weight. To a journalist triaging an inbox in seconds, a long release signals one thing reliably: the editing work has been left to the reader. Editors trim stories from the bottom up, readers stop where they stop, and material beyond the news earns nothing except a faster delete. If anything, length correlates with the opposite of impressiveness — an announcement padded with company history, adjective-stacked quotes and two stories bundled into one.

The truth is about fit rather than brevity for its own sake. A release should run as long as its news genuinely requires — for most announcements, a few hundred words covering the headline facts, the evidence, a quote and the background — with every paragraph able to justify itself. Our section-by-section guidance on how long a press release should be works through the sensible ranges by type of announcement. Substance is what impresses. Substance usually takes fewer words than people fear.

Myth 7: Send It to Everyone

Volume feels like ambition and functions like its opposite. Every irrelevant pitch teaches a journalist to delete your name on sight, teaches spam filters to treat your address accordingly, and spends the sender reputation that your genuinely good stories will need. Distribution databases make it technically easy to mail thousands of people; that the button exists says nothing about whether pressing it is wise. The journalists who might have covered a well-aimed story receive exactly the same treatment as the thousands for whom it was never relevant, and they price your organisation accordingly.

It depends on the story only at the margins. Genuinely broad news — a national consumer launch, a story of real public interest — justifies wider distribution. But “wider” still means the relevant categories, regions and beats, chosen deliberately; it never means everyone. Targeting is not a limitation reluctantly placed on reach. Targeting is what reach is made of.

Myth 8: Coverage Equals Sales

Coverage sits earlier in the chain than the till. What it produces is awareness, familiarity and credibility — the conditions under which people later choose you, shortlist you, or take your call. Purchases follow for many additional reasons: need, price, timing, alternatives. Judging a press release by the same week’s sales therefore mismeasures it, usually in the direction of declaring a failure something that did its actual job perfectly well.

Sometimes the chain does shorten dramatically: a consumer product featured in the right gift guide in the right season can travel from page to purchase in a day. Whether that happens depends on the product, the outlet and the moment — which is precisely why it cannot be the plan. The reliable approach is to keep the ledgers separate: measure coverage as coverage (who published, how accurately, who responded), measure sales as sales, and treat anyone who merges the two sets of books as selling you the confusion.

Myth 9: You Can Write It in an Hour the Night Before

The typing can be quick. The release cannot. Behind the visible text sit the slow, unglamorous parts: confirming every fact against its source, getting quotes approved by the people quoted, gathering images with the rights to use them, checking the contact details, arranging sign-off, setting the timing. Compress those stages into the final hour and the errors move in — the misspelled name, the wrong date, the superseded price — each one small, each one travelling at the speed of distribution.

It depends on the announcement, honestly assessed. A routine appointment, with the facts at hand and one approver awake, is genuinely simple work for an experienced writer. A results announcement, a product launch or anything remotely sensitive is not. The arithmetic never favours rushing: a correction costs more — in time, in money, in credibility with exactly the journalists you were courting — than the evening you saved.

Myth 10: Free Distribution Gets the Same Result as Paid

The overlap is real: free tiers genuinely do publish your release, and for some announcements that is all that is needed. But publication is where the similarity ends. What differs between free and paid is everything around it — the size and quality of the network carrying the release, the handling of images and video, targeting and scheduling, and the placement report that tells you where the release actually appeared. Free and paid distribution are the same verb attached to noticeably different services, and pretending otherwise serves neither the free tiers (judged against expectations they never set) nor the paid ones.

Whether the difference matters depends entirely on the story. For a minor update, a practice run or a small local announcement, free can be entirely sufficient — our guide to free press release distribution services makes that case honestly. For a launch with stakeholders who will ask what the announcement achieved, the reporting and reach of a paid tier are usually the substance of what you are buying. Match the route to the stakes; the myth is that the choice does not exist.

What Actually Works Instead

Strip the myths away and the effective practice is almost disappointingly consistent. It looks like this:

• Real news, honestly identified — something has happened, changed or become available, and it matters to someone beyond your own organisation.
• A properly written release — a headline that states the news, a lead that answers the basic questions, evidence in order of importance, a quote with something to say.
• Deliberate targeting — the right outlets and the right desks, chosen name by name where the story deserves it.
• Distribution you can verify, with a report of where the release appeared that you can open, check and file.
• One useful follow-up, offering something new — then space, and a human being available when a journalist responds.
• Honest measurement that keeps publication, coverage and outcomes in their separate columns.
• Repetition over time, so that familiarity, credibility and the public record compound instead of resetting with every announcement.

None of it is a trick, a hack or a secret. That is rather the point. The format rewards organisations that treat it as a discipline — and the myths, every one of them, are what rushes in wherever the discipline has been skipped.

FAQs

1. Are press releases still worth doing at all?
Yes — for genuine news, as part of a wider programme of media relations. Most of the myths fail on expectations rather than on the format itself: they promise too much (coverage on demand, rankings, sales) or demand too little of it (one attempt, an hour’s work, no targeting). Judged on what it actually does — publishing your announcement properly, putting it in front of the right people, and keeping a public record — the press release earns its place.

2. Where do most of these myths come from?
Many circulate because they sell something: distribution marketed as coverage, releases marketed as a search-ranking tool, volume marketed as reach. A claim that conveniently ends in a purchase deserves an extra question before it is believed — and that applies to claims made by anyone selling distribution or PR services, the publishers of this article included.

3. Which myth does the most damage?
In practice, usually the first: the expectation of certain coverage. It converts a useful tool into what feels like a broken promise, and the disappointment attaches itself to the whole practice of PR rather than to the expectation where it belongs. Most abandoned press programmes were not failed by their releases; they were failed by what they were told the releases would do.

4. How can I tell whether advice about press releases is reliable?
Look for the separations. Reliable advice keeps distribution distinct from coverage, visibility distinct from rankings, and awareness distinct from sales — and it admits what depends on the story. Advice with no caveats in it, that happens to end at a checkout, is a sales page wearing a guide’s clothes.

Conclusion

Myths survive because each one holds a grain of truth stretched past its limit. Releases can lead to coverage — with the editor’s decision quietly removed. They can build visibility — with the timescale and the mechanism quietly removed. They suit small companies, short drafts and free tiers — with the conditions quietly removed. Restoring those mechanisms, timescales and conditions is most of what honest PR advice consists of, and most of what this article has tried to do.

So keep the format and drop the folklore. Announce real news, write it properly, aim it carefully, measure it honestly, and do it again. And judge every sweeping claim about press releases — this article’s included — by one simple test: does it tell you what will happen, or only what honestly can? The second is the truth. The first is a myth in the making.