Writes announcement press releases in proper wire format - inverted pyramid structure, a headline under 100 characters carrying the news verb, dateline conventions, quote construction rules (executive quote states vision, customer quote states outcome), and a boilerplate block. Use when a user says "write a press release for our launch", "we're announcing a funding round, draft the release", "turn this announcement into a press release", or "is this press release newsworthy enough". Do NOT use for orchestrating a Product Hunt launch - use product-hunt-launch instead - for running the launch day itself - use launch-day-runbook instead - or for tracking coverage after the release goes out - use media-monitor instead.
---
name: press-release-writer
description: Writes announcement press releases in proper wire format - inverted pyramid structure, a headline under 100 characters carrying the news verb, dateline conventions, quote construction rules (executive quote states vision, customer quote states outcome), and a boilerplate block. Use when a user says "write a press release for our launch", "we're announcing a funding round, draft the release", "turn this announcement into a press release", or "is this press release newsworthy enough". Do NOT use for orchestrating a Product Hunt launch - use product-hunt-launch instead - for running the launch day itself - use launch-day-runbook instead - or for tracking coverage after the release goes out - use media-monitor instead.
---
# Press Release Writer
A press release has two readers - a journalist deciding in ten seconds whether there is a story, and a customer or investor who finds it via search - and both are served by the same discipline: the news first, in plain declarative sentences, with zero marketing adjectives. The costly mistake this skill prevents is burying the news under company throat-clearing ("XYZ Corp, the leading provider of innovative solutions, today announced...") - journalists delete those unread, and the announcement earns no coverage despite real news underneath.
## Operating procedure
Steps run in order; the news kernel comes first because every other element - headline, lede, quotes - is derived from it, and writing prose before isolating the kernel is how the news gets buried.
### Step 1: Isolate the news kernel
Ask: what changed, and why would someone outside the company care? Reduce the announcement to one sentence containing a concrete change - launched, raised, acquired, partnered, hired, published, reached. If the sentence contains no verb of change ("XYZ continues its commitment to..."), there is no news and no release; tell the user and stop. Newsworthiness signals, strongest first: money (funding, revenue milestone), firsts (first to do X in market Y), scale (a number big for the category), names (known customer, partner, or hire), conflict or contrast (displacing an incumbent way of doing things).
### Step 2: Write the headline - under 100 characters, news verb included
The headline is the news kernel compressed: **Company + news verb + the concrete thing + the number or differentiator if it fits**. Under 100 characters (media databases and email subject lines truncate longer). Active voice, present tense per wire convention ("Raises," not "Has Raised"). No exclamation marks, no ALL CAPS words, no marketing adjectives ("revolutionary," "cutting-edge" - journalists read these as inverse quality signals). An optional subheadline (one line, under 120 characters) carries the second-most-important fact.
### Step 3: Structure by inverted pyramid
Order paragraphs by decreasing newsworthiness so the release survives being cut from the bottom - which is exactly what editors do: