How To Format Your News Release
How you present your news is just as important as your content. Using the correct formatting creates a professional press release that is more media and SEO friendly. Follow these guidelines to best create a winning press or news release. For additional content recommendations, also see how to write a successful press release.
Initial Case: Your headline should be written in initial case with the first letter of each word capitalized. Exceptions include words less than three characters and prepositions.
ALL CAPS: It is bad form to submit a press release entirely in upper case letters. It will be ignored by journalists and many readers. In addition, avoid using ALL CAPS to create emphasis on certain words or phrases. It is a red flag that your release is an advertisement or spam. Always use mixed case when formatting your news release.
Summary: Include a one paragraph summary that is two to three sentences in length. Some distribution points will only display your headline, summary and a link to your news release. Without a summary paragraph, you may reduce the effectiveness of your news since readers will not be enticed to click through to the full release.
Dateline: Your press release should contain a dateline like this:
City, State, Day, Month and Year. Including the city and town related to your news is optional but helpful for readers.
Spacing: Only natural line wraps, not forced line breaks. Leave one line break between each paragraph. Nothing else.
Grammar: Be sure to follow the accepted rules of grammar and style. Grammatical and punctuation errors affect your credibility. Press Release editors will hold your press release from distribution until you fix excessive errors. If you wish, Press Release offers full service writing, editing, optimization and distribution of your news release.
HTML: Press Release does not support embedded HTML or other markup languages. Do not include any HTML formatting.
Link Spam: Include no more than 3-5 links depending on the length of your release. Include both anchor text links and active URL hyperlinks.
Lists: Long lists will cause your release to be rejected from the news search engines. Limit your use of listed items.
Length: We recommend release lengths between 300 and 800 words in paragraph form.