The media release is still standing (but not the same)

"The report of my death was an exaggeration." Mark Twain's line feels like a fitting opener for a piece about the media release, which has been declared finished more than a few times over the last several years.

Spend any time reading PR conversations on LinkedIn and you might come away convinced the press release is done. Journalists ignore them. Agencies use them to justify fees. The format has had its day. It is a confident take, repeated often enough that it has started to sound like fact.

The reality is different. For B2B technology brands, the release still does things that owned content cannot. It is democratic, reaching every journalist at the same time. It creates a clear, attributable record of news. It forces internal alignment on messaging, which anyone who has sat through a release approval process knows is often more valuable than the coverage itself. And unlike a LinkedIn post or a brand story, it carries an implicit signal that the news was considered worth announcing formally, which still matters to journalists and analysts tracking a company over time.

That does not let the badly written ones off the hook. A release that buries the news, leads with a quote that sounds like it was approved by legal rather than spoken by a human, and carries a headline no newsroom would print was always weak.

But a release written the way a journalist would write it, with the news up front, a headline that mirrors the target publication rather than the client's internal naming conventions, and a quote with a genuine perspective, still cuts through. In our experience it cuts through.

There is another dimension to this that did not exist five years ago. AI-driven discovery is reshaping how buyers find and evaluate brands, and the sources feeding those tools are largely earned content. Media coverage, analyst commentary, credible third-party references. A well-structured release picked up by credible outlets is not just feeding a journalist's inbox. It is building the pattern of signals that AI tools use to understand what a company does and whether it can be trusted. Consistent naming, clear attribution and verifiable facts have always made for a better release. Now they also determine how a brand surfaces when a buyer is researching without clicking through to anyone's website.

Used well, the media release is one solid tool in an integrated communications program and remains very far from redundant.