A press release is a document you write about yourself, pay to send out, and approve before it goes anywhere. Press is when someone else decides you are worth their readers' time.
Those two things get lumped together constantly, and I think the confusion costs people real money. So let me pull them apart.
Who made the decision
The cleanest way I know to tell them apart is to ask who chose it.
With a press release, you chose it. You picked the topic, wrote the headline, approved the quotes and paid for the distribution. Nobody had to agree that it mattered.
With earned press, a person with editorial judgment chose it. A reporter or editor looked at what you had and decided it was worth publishing under their name and their outlet's name. They could have said no. Plenty of people do.
That second part is the whole value. The decision belongs to someone else, and readers know it, even if they could not put it into words.
Why a release still has a place
I am not telling you to stop writing releases. They are useful for plain announcements: a new location, a hire, a product launch, an award. They give you something official to point to, and they put the facts in writing.
The trouble starts when a release gets sold as if it were coverage. A release that sits on a distribution page is a record of what you said. It is not a record of what anyone else thought. I wrote about how that plays out with logo strips in Most "As Seen In" logos don't mean what you think. The short version is that a logo can be technically true and still tell a reader the wrong story.
If someone offers you "press" for a flat fee and a guaranteed date, ask them one question. Can the outlet say no? If the answer is no, you are buying distribution. That can be fine. Just call it what it is.
What reporters think of the pitches they get
The people on the other side of the inbox are not shy about this. Muck Rack's State of Journalism 2026 report, covered by PR Net, says 88% of journalists delete pitches that miss their beat. Most of what lands in their inbox is not meant for them.
I do not read that as journalists being hard to please. I read it as a filter that works. Something relevant, specific and written for their audience has a real chance. Something blasted to a list does not. A release is usually the second kind of thing, because it is written for everyone, which means it is written for no one in particular.
Why this matters more now
People increasingly ask AI who to trust before they pick a firm, a clinic or a brand. I covered that in Your next client already asked AI about you. Ask AI about a business and it tends to lean on what independent sources say, not on what the business says about itself. A page that begins "Company X is proud to announce" is the business talking about itself. An article where a publication's own writer describes the business is someone else vouching.
I do not claim to know exactly how any one AI tool weighs each source, and nobody outside those companies does. What I can say is that independent coverage is the kind of proof that holds up when a person checks, and that is the direction things are moving. Our clients' campaigns have produced 27M+ AI citations, and the work behind that has been about getting real publications to say real things, not about getting more releases out the door.
What I would do
Write the release when you have a plain announcement. Put it on your own site. Then treat it as the starting material, not the finish line.
Next, ask what a reporter could actually do with your news. Is there a point of view, a number, a local angle, a person worth quoting? If yes, pitch that, to someone who covers it, in a few short lines. If not, the honest answer is that you do not have a story yet, and no distribution service will invent one.
Here is a question for you. Look at the last three things your business announced. Did anyone outside your company decide they were worth publishing? If the answer is no, that is not a failure. It is just where to start.
