Start Me Up PR Inc.
You told ChatGPT to write you a press release. It spat out corporate word salad. Here’s
why that happens — and the journalist-built system that fixes it.
“AI doesn’t know that ‘we are pleased to announce’ is the fastest way to get your email trashed. It doesn’t know what a lede is, or why burying it kills your chances.”
The Problem With One-Shot AI Press Releases
If you have ever typed ‘write me a press release about my new product’ into ChatGPT, Claude,
or Gemini and felt vaguely disappointed by the result, you are not alone. The output is technically
correct. It has a headline. It has quotes. It has a boilerplate at the bottom. But it sounds like it was
written by a committee that has never met a journalist.
The reason is straightforward: large language models are trained on text from the internet, and
the internet is full of bad press releases. When you ask AI to write a press release in one shot, it
produces the average of every mediocre press release it has ever read. Which is exactly what
you get.
But the problem goes deeper than training data. Press releases are not just formatted
documents — they are strategic communication tools built around how newsrooms actually work.
And most AI tools have no idea how newsrooms work.
What Journalists Actually Look For
Editors at publications receive hundreds of pitches a week. They decide in roughly three seconds
whether to keep reading or delete. The decision is almost never about the product itself. It is
about whether the opening of the document sounds like news or sounds like marketing.
News sounds like: ‘Forty thousand veterinary clinics are using a new AI tool to detect pain in cats
before owners or vets can see it.’ Marketing sounds like: ‘We are pleased to announce the
launch of our revolutionary AI-powered pet health platform.’ The first version gets read. The
second version gets deleted.
Journalists also look for specific things in a release: a lede that starts with impact rather than
company background, quotes that sound like real humans rather than corporate-speak, data and
proof points that give them something concrete to report, and a clear sense of why this story
matters to their specific readers. Most AI-generated releases miss on all four counts.
The 8-Step Layered Approach
The fix is not better AI. The fix is a better process. Instead of asking AI to write an entire release
in one shot, the journalist-designed system breaks it into eight distinct components that build on
each other — the same way a journalist would actually draft a story.
The eight steps are: headline, subheadline, lede, body, quotes, call to action, boilerplate, and
press contact block. Each one is built separately, with specific rules and goals. Each one feeds
into the next. By the time you reach Step 8, you have a complete, journalist-quality release —
assembled piece by piece rather than generated all at once.
This approach works with any AI tool. The prompts are tool-agnostic. The strategy is in the
sequence and the specific constraints each prompt applies, not in the AI itself.
The Headline: Where Most Releases Die First
A press release headline has one job: to make a journalist keep reading. It is not a tagline. It is
not a product description. It is a news headline — which means it focuses on impact and
outcome, not features and announcements.
Headlines that get deleted: ‘Company X Launches Revolutionary New Platform.’ Headlines that
get read: ‘New Tool Detects Cat Pain Before Owners or Vets Can.’ The difference is not length. It
is that the second one tells you something real happened to real beings in the world.
Good press release headlines stay under 15 words, avoid buzzwords like ‘revolutionary,’
‘groundbreaking,’ and ‘innovative,’ and sound like something you would see in a news publication
— not a company blog.
The Lede: The Paragraph That Determines Everything
The lede is the opening paragraph of your press release, and it is the single most important piece
of writing in the entire document. Journalists use the lede to decide in seconds whether the story
is worth reading in full. Most AI-generated releases bury the lede — starting with company
history or product descriptions instead of the impact the story is actually about.
A well-written lede starts with who is affected and what happened. It answers the who, what,
when, where, and why in 50 to 75 words. It reads the way the opening paragraph of a news
article reads — factual, specific, and immediate. It never starts with the company name.
The Quote Problem: Why ‘We Are Pleased to Announce’ Kills Releases
Journalist tip: the single fastest way to identify an amateur press release is to read the quotes. If
the CEO quote starts with ‘We are pleased to announce’ or ‘We are excited to share,’ the release
goes in the trash. Every journalist has read that sentence ten thousand times. It carries zero
information and signals that nobody thought carefully about what the quote should actually do.
A good quote reveals something the body text does not already say. It shows motivation,
emotion, or vision. It sounds like something a real human being would say out loud to a friend —
not something a corporate communications team would approve for a filing. If you read your
quote and think ‘any CEO at any company could have said this,’ rewrite it.
The 7 Mistakes That Get Releases Deleted
Even with the right process, these errors sink releases consistently.
The 20-Minute Release
Run through all eight steps in the same conversation thread. Do not start a new chat between
steps — the AI needs the context from what came before to do each step well. Each step should
take two to four minutes. The final assembly prompt combines all eight sections into a properly
formatted release you can copy and paste.
The result is a media release that sounds like a newsroom produced it — because the process
was reverse-engineered from how newsrooms actually work.
⬛ SMUPPR TIP: Works with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or any other AI tool. The prompts are
the strategy — the AI is just the typewriter.
Don’t let AI write another forgettable press release.
The AI Release Builder gives you the exact prompts, sequence, and journalist-tested framework used throughout this article.
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START ME UP PR INC.
Start Me Up PR is a fractional public relations firm and resource provider for founders, entrepreneurs, startups, and scaleups — built for the ones who are done playing it safe with their narrative.
Founded in 2021 by Theresa Tayler, the agency breaks away from traditional PR conventions by championing raw, unfiltered storytelling that helps brands own their voice unapologetically. With a three-tiered service structure — from self-service digital tools to full-scale PR strategy — Start Me Up PR meets you where you are and grows with you.
