We heard many musings about the press release at our Future Focus conference, from how many media pros actually read them to whether tools like ChatGPT would replace the writers that so thoughtfully craft them. That is, of course, if the press release still exists. Gregg Castano, CEO News Direct, explains why extinction is not imminent, and how the press release is shape-shifting to better serve today's audiences (and their attention spans).

In spite of the never-ending drumbeat of doomsday prognosticators who have been foretelling the demise of the press release for the better part of three decades, this staple of the public relations arsenal is not dead, dying or even particularly unhealthy. That said, it is becoming increasingly evident that the press release is, almost as an act of sheer resolve, undergoing significant – to use de rigeur terminology – disruption.

Enter, the “news release”

For starters, it doesn’t seem accurate to even call it a press release any longer. The press – itself an anachronistic term that harkens back to the long-extinct era in which print media predominated – is not necessarily the intended target of this content anymore, thanks to the Internet.

As the degree of difficulty in gaining “earned” media coverage has exponentially increased, PR strategy has evolved to circumvent the media filter altogether to directly reach the true target audience and the general population or subsets thereof, such as investors and consumers. Therefore, since reaching the “press” is no longer the main objective, it seems more appropriate to use the moniker “news” release in its place. Now more accurately rechristened, the news release has been repurposed as a tool to be found on public-facing news sites and via search engines.

Text and multimedia formats matter

That factor alone demands that the news release be re-engineered for a new age. No longer can it be a static, text-only templated document. Instead, to attract and sustain the attention of the modern information consumer (and win the affections of search engine algorithms), the news release is practically duty-bound to perform almost as a short-form entertainment genre in and of itself. That doesn’t speak well of the depth of commitment the target audience has to understanding the finer points of the message, but it is consistent with the TikTok era in which we now live.

As a result, the news release needs to be treated as a dynamic canvas that features multimedia, especially video, to augment and perhaps even replace text as the primary conveyor of the issuer’s message. Where text is utilized, it requires writing not just for journalists but also for those tricky ever-changing algorithms. PRs must also kneel at the altar of brevity, as mentioned above, to avoid overwhelming an increasingly attention-span and/or time management challenged audience.

Predictions for the press news release

It remains to be seen what impact the recent emergence of ChatGPT technology will have on the evolution of the news release. Chances are that it will further hasten the demise of text-heavy communications as readers increasingly begin to question the authenticity of authorship. The net effect could well be that consumers accelerate the migration to more sensory-oriented formats such as video, which are better suited to dispensing core concepts in condensed timeframes.