Press releases are the number one story source again

Press releases are back at number one. Medianet's 2026 Australian Media Landscape Report, based on responses from 803 Australian journalists, found 86% use press releases as a source of stories. That is first place for the first time since 2019. Social media as a story source fell to 65%.

If you retired the release around 2021 because someone told you it was dead, you retired the wrong thing.

Why it turned around

Two forces, both about time and risk.

Newsrooms are smaller than they were, and the journalists who remain cover wider rounds. Trawling for stories is a luxury. A source document that arrives already checked, already quotable, with a named human attached, saves an hour that nobody has.

The second force is verification. Social platforms filled with synthetic images, fabricated quotes and AI-written accounts that look real enough to fool a fast scroll. Sourcing a story from a social post now carries a risk that sourcing it from a named organisation with an ABN and a phone number does not. Journalists moved back to the channel where someone can be held responsible for the claim.

The release only works if it is a source document

This is the part most marketing teams get wrong. A release that reads like an ad gets deleted whether or not 86% of journalists say they use the format. What they use is a document they can work from.

Test yours against this list.

The subject line states the news in plain words. Not a clever line. Not your campaign name. The news. If a journalist cannot tell from the subject line whether it belongs on their round, it does not get opened.

The first sentence carries who, what, where, when and how much. If your first sentence contains a phrase about being pleased to announce, the actual news has been pushed to sentence three and you have lost most readers.

There is a named human with a direct mobile. Not a shared inbox and not a switchboard. A journalist working to a 3pm deadline will drop your story rather than chase a phone tree.

The quote sounds like a person. Read it aloud. If nobody would say it in a meeting, rewrite it. A quote that says something specific and slightly risky is worth ten that say the company is proud of its people.

Any data is in a table, with the method stated and the raw figures available on request. Sample size, dates, geography. Give a journalist a claim without a method and you have given them a reason to spike it.

Images are print resolution, with captions and photographer credit. A story that runs with a picture gets more space than one that does not, and the picture is the thing you control.

If there is an embargo, it states the date, time and timezone. AEST, not next week.

What 86% does not mean

It means journalists use releases as a source. It does not mean your release will run. Most do not.

The releases that work share one property: they are the only place a particular fact exists. A survey nobody else has run. An operational number from inside your business. A first, a shutdown, a price change, a hire that signals a direction, a piece of data from your own systems that nobody outside can get.

If the fact in your release is available from six other places, you are not offering a story. You are offering a summary of one.

Distribution: direct beats blast

A wire service puts your release in front of everyone, which mostly means it gets filed by nobody. It is useful for compliance-style announcements and for creating a citable public record, which matters more now that AI answer engines retrieve from published sources.

For actual coverage, send direct to a named journalist on the round the story belongs to. Read their last ten bylines before you decide it is their round. The masthead's about page will not tell you what somebody is actually covering this quarter.

Sequence it. Trade and industry titles first, because they have the space and the appetite. Regional and local next, where the story has a geography. National last, and only if the story genuinely carries nationally.

The honest limitation

A release is a poor tool for anything that needs persuasion. It cannot argue a position, it cannot build a case over a thousand words, and it will not fix a company nobody has heard of.

What it does is make a fact easy to publish. That is a narrow job, and it is a job worth doing well, because 86% of the people who decide what gets published just told you they still start there.

Write it as a document a journalist could file, not a message you want them to carry.