Pitch Email vs. Press Release

Why this matters

A press release sent where a pitch email belongs is one of the fastest ways to mark yourself as inexperienced to a journalist — the formats serve different functions and are appropriate at different stages of a story. Understanding when each format earns a read versus an eye-roll is foundational to professional media relations.

Try it yourself

1. Find an example press release from a company in your space (use PR Newswire or their newsroom page) and identify which elements a journalist would actually use and which are padding for a corporate audience.
2. Draft the first three sentences of a pitch email for your current announcement and check whether it answers 'why this reader, why this story, why now' — if any answer is missing, rewrite before it is a sentence about your company.
3. Compare the word count of your draft pitch (target: under 150 words) against a sample press release (typically 400–600 words) and identify what the press release contains that the pitch should not.

References

• PR Daily — Pitch vs. Press Release