By: Kelly Maicon, Senior Account Director Professional Services 

For years, we watched the press release get roasted. 

“It’s dead.” “Journalists hate them.” “Nobody reads them anymore.” 

And honestly? Some of that was fair. We’d all seen the bloated, quote-stuffed, embargo-laden releases that went nowhere and said nothing. The format had gotten lazy. So, we moved on to strategic pitches, to social, to relationships, to storytelling. All good instincts. 

But here’s what nobody saw coming: generative AI just gave the press release a second life. 

Not as a media relations tool. As infrastructure. 

When AI tools summarize your news, draft your coverage, or pull “facts” about your organization they need somewhere to pull from. And if you haven’t given them a clean, accurate, primary source? They’ll find one. Or worse, they’ll make one up. 

The press release is now the source of truth that everything else builds from. Your earned coverage. Your AI-generated content. Your social posts. Your search presence. All of it traces back to what you put in that document. 

That changes how I think about writing them. 

It’s not about the wire anymore. It’s not even really about the journalist opening their inbox on a Tuesday morning. It’s about creating a record that’s accurate, quotable, and structured in a way that both humans and AI can actually use. 

The releases I’m writing now look a little different than they did five years ago. Cleaner structure. Sharper data points. Fewer adjectives. Real quotes that a person actually said, that mean something, that could stand alone. 

Because now they might have to. 

The communicators I see struggling with this are the ones who spent the last decade treating the press release like something you fire off because the client expects it, then move on. That worked fine when the release was the end of the process. 

It doesn’t work now that the release is the beginning of it. 

If you’re in communications, it’s worth taking a fresh look at how you’re writing these. Not because journalists suddenly fell back in love with them. But because the information ecosystem has changed underneath all of us and the press release quietly became one of the most important documents your organization produces. 

Dead format. Alive again. Just doing a completely different job.