How to Write a Press Release in St. Louis
Revised November 6, 2026
How to get local news to cover your story?
Give a newsroom something that actually changed, in writing, in the first sentence. Put the who, what, when, where and why at the top, add a phone number somebody answers, and send it to the right desk early enough to be scheduled. Local relevance decides the rest.
Keep reading ↓At 6:40 in the morning a reporter picks a phone up off the nightstand and starts clearing email with one thumb. Forty-some unread. One subject line reads PRESS RELEASE, colon, then the name of a business she has never heard of. Gone in about two seconds, never opened. The person who sent it will spend the next week wondering whether the address was wrong.
The address was fine. The document was the problem. That release may well have had real news in it, because a family shop moving into a bigger building after decades on the same corner is news, and so is a hire that changes what a business can actually do, or an anniversary nobody expected it to reach, or an award judged by people with no stake in the company. The news was in there. It was buried under a slogan.
A press release isn’t an ad and it isn’t a letter. It’s a working document in a format newsrooms have used for a century, built so a stranger on deadline can lift facts out of it without calling you first. Get the order right and you’re easy to cover. Get it wrong and you’re easy to skip. So: the document itself, top to bottom.
How to get local news to cover your story?
Give a newsroom something that actually changed, in writing, in the first sentence. Put the who, what, when, where and why at the top, add a phone number somebody answers, and send it to the right desk early enough to be scheduled. Local relevance decides the rest.
Everything past that is craft. Coverage is a scheduling decision made by somebody with too many messages and not enough hours, so your job is to remove work from their day. A release does that by being boring in the right places: plain headline, real date, facts in descending order of importance. The persuading is done by the news. There’s nothing else to persuade with.
Two documents do two different jobs here, and mixing them up is the most common mistake we see. The release is the record. The email around it is the ask. If you want that second half — who to send it to, what the first two sentences of the note should say — we covered it in our guide to pitching your story to St. Louis local media. This page is about what sits underneath the note.
What is a press release, and how is it different from a pitch or an ad?
A release states news in the third person for anybody who wants to use it. A pitch is a short personal email to one reporter asking them to look. An ad is space you bought, where every word stays yours. Same information, three different jobs. A document trying to do all three does none of them.
The ad is easy to separate out. You paid for it, so you get to say premier and award-winning and family-owned since whenever, and readers quietly discount all of it because they know who wrote it. A release gets written on the opposite assumption: a stranger is going to edit this. Any sentence you wouldn’t want quoted back to you flatly, with the exclamation point stripped off, is a sentence to cut now.
The pitch and the release travel together. Paste the release into the body of the email under two human sentences, or send the note and offer the release to anyone who wants it. Never send a release cold with no person in front of it. And don’t send a two-page release when the news is one sentence long.
The seven parts, in the order they belong
Headline, dateline, lead, body, quote, boilerplate, contact. That order isn’t decoration. It’s descending usefulness, arranged so a person who reads only the top third still has the story, and an editor cutting from the bottom never cuts anything that mattered.
The headline
Say what happened, in plain words, with a verb in it. “Hardware store opens second location in Fenton” is a headline. “Growing with our community since day one” is a tagline, and a tagline at the top tells an editor there’s no news underneath. Ten words, roughly. No exclamation point, ever.
The dateline
City and date, run into the front of the first paragraph. Your own town in caps, then the date you want the news out. It looks like a formality and it isn’t: those are the two facts an editor checks first. Is this local, and is this current.
The lead
One sentence carrying the whole story. Who did what, when, where, and why anyone outside the business should look up. Here’s the test: if a person reads only this sentence, can they repeat your news accurately to somebody else? Write it last. You rarely know what the story is until you’ve written around it for twenty minutes.
The body
Two or three short paragraphs, each less essential than the one above it. Supporting detail, numbers you can document, context, what happens next. Paragraph two props up the lead. Paragraph three adds texture. Paragraph four should be written in full knowledge that it will probably die, and that’s fine, because that’s the design.
The quote
One quote, two sentences, attributed to a named person with a title. Most of them are useless. There’s a whole section below about why.
The boilerplate
A short closing paragraph saying what the business is, where it sits, how long it’s been there and what it sells. Write it once in the third person and reuse it forever. This is the only spot in the document where mild self-description belongs, and even here, plain beats proud.
The contact block
A name, a cell number, an email address, and the hours you’ll actually pick up. Not a general info inbox. Not a main line that rolls to voicemail at five. Somebody working toward an evening deadline calls once, and if nobody answers, the story runs without you. Add one line offering photos on request.
Where do the five Ws belong?
All five live in the first two sentences, and four of them belong in the first one. Who did it, what happened, when, where. The fifth — why it matters to anybody else — is the hardest, the most important, and the one most releases never get around to at all.
Run it as a checklist on your own lead before another person sees it. Who: a named business, not “a local company.” What: a verb, something that changed. When: a real date, not “recently.” Where: a street, a neighborhood, a municipality. Why: the sentence explaining who this touches besides you. If the honest answer to why is “we’re excited,” you have an announcement, not news. Two more Ws, how and how much, belong down in paragraph two.
Why does the first sentence have to carry the whole story?
Because it’s the only part that reliably gets read. An editor scanning a full inbox makes the keep-or-delete call off a headline and one sentence, and a reader who reaches the published version often stops in the same place. Anything you push into paragraph four is a bet on attention you don’t have.
That’s the whole logic of the inverted pyramid. Heaviest facts on top, lighter ones under them, nothing load-bearing near the floor. The format exists because newspaper columns used to get trimmed from the bottom to fit the page, and it survives because phone screens and inboxes do the same thing for different reasons. Write it so a person can stop after any paragraph and still hold something true and complete.
Compare two openings for identical news. First: “We are thrilled to announce an exciting new chapter for our family business and the wonderful community that has supported us.” Second: “A family-run hardware store is moving three blocks into a space twice the size, adding a tool rental counter the neighborhood hasn’t had since the last one closed.” One of those is a feeling. The other is a story.
How do you write a quote somebody will actually use?
Say something only you could say. A quote exists to add a voice and a fact the narration can’t carry, not to restate the lead in a warmer tone. If a reporter can delete your quote and lose nothing, they will, and the story runs with nobody from your side in it.
The unusable one has a shape you’ll recognize instantly. “We are excited to bring our commitment to quality service to even more customers in the region.” Nobody says that out loud. No fact, no opinion, no human. Trade it for something specific: what surprised you, what was hard, what the thing costs you in sleep, what you were quietly worried about the week you signed.
Easiest method going: talk, then transcribe. Say the answer out loud to somebody standing in the room, record it on your phone, and keep the version that came out of your mouth before you tidied it. It doesn’t have to be the owner, either. The person who has run that counter since before you bought the place is usually the better voice.
Length, formatting, and the file nobody can open
One page. Call it three hundred to five hundred words, four or five short paragraphs, pasted into the body of an email. Anything longer is being read by nobody. A designed PDF with your logo across the top is actively harder to use than plain text, which is the opposite of what the design was for.
The old conventions still earn their keep, mostly as a signal that you know the form. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE at the top when the news is ready now. A blank line between paragraphs, two or three sentences each. Three pound signs, ###, centered at the end so a reader knows nothing got cut off. Spell names the way the people spell them. Attachments are where releases go to die, so if you attach a photo, attach one, sized for email, captioned left to right.
When should you send it?
A dated event needs a week or two of warning at minimum. News that already happened goes out the same day, the hour you can confirm it. The mistake almost everybody makes is sending Saturday’s event on Friday afternoon, by which point the weekend is assigned and there’s no crew and no page left to give you.
Different rooms run on different clocks, and none of them run on yours. A daily wants days. A weekly publishes on one fixed day, so count backward from it. A monthly works a season ahead, meaning a December story gets written while the air conditioning is still on. A television assignment desk can move inside a single day, but only for something visible that a camera can physically reach and park near.
Skip the embargo. It’s a request to hold news until a set hour, it runs on a relationship that already exists, and from a small business it mostly reads as a stranger handing out instructions. If your news isn’t sensitive enough to leak, it isn’t sensitive enough to embargo. Send it when it’s true. If a date is genuinely fixed, write that in plain words instead.
For an event, send twice. Once far enough ahead to make a calendar listing, then a short reminder a few days out with the start time, the address and where people can park. Those two sends do different jobs, and neither replaces the other.
Announcing an event? First hire a DJ in St. Louis
What gets a press release deleted?
A headline that’s a slogan, a subject line with no news in it, and a phone number nobody answers. Those three account for most of the casualties. The rest is padding, superlatives you can’t back up, and files that won’t open on a phone at a stoplight.
- A subject line that says “Press Release” or “For your consideration” and nothing about what happened.
- The company history in paragraph one and the actual news in paragraph five.
- Words like premier, leading, unique and state-of-the-art, none of which a reporter can verify or print.
- A claim with no source behind it. If you say biggest or first, be ready to say biggest according to what.
- No date, or a date written as “coming soon.”
- A contact line with a general inbox and no cell number.
- A logo-heavy PDF, a shared drive link that needs a login, or twelve megabytes of photos nobody asked for.
- Two pages about a thing that only affects the people already inside the building.
None of those are style crimes. Each one costs a reporter minutes they don’t have, and the cheapest way to save those minutes is the next message down. Read your own draft as somebody who owes you nothing.
Does your news pass the local-angle test?
One question settles it: who else around here does this affect besides you? A metro newsroom isn’t covering your business, it’s covering the place, and your news gets in when it says something about the place. Everything short of that is a calendar listing at best.
Reframing is the actual work, and there’s nothing dishonest about it. A second location is a business story. A second location in a stretch of town that hasn’t had that service since the last one closed is a neighborhood story. A hire is an internal memo. A hire that means a repair nobody could get done locally can now get done locally is something a reader cares about. Same facts. Different subject.
Name the place while you’re at it. A release saying “the St. Louis area” does less work than one saying a specific street in Brentwood or a strip in Arnold, because weeklies and metro desks both sort by geography before anything else. Which room to aim at is its own question, and our guide to St. Louis local newspapers and magazines lays out who publishes what and who reads it.
Most small-business news isn’t a story yet
Say that to yourself before a stranger says it for you. It isn’t an insult, it’s arithmetic: this metro holds thousands of businesses and a shrinking number of reporters. The honest move is building the angle, not dressing up the announcement with bigger adjectives.
Finish this sentence. Last month this wasn’t true, and now it is. Can’t finish it? Then you have a milestone hunting for a hook, and there are four reliable ways to give it one: attach a real date, attach a real person, attach a number you can document, or attach somebody else entirely — a school, a pantry, a block association, the shop two doors down in Manchester. Partnership makes a small thing measurably bigger.
If that framing work is the part you already know you won’t do, that’s what you’re really shopping for when you call an agency. Not the typing. Our piece on what a PR firm actually does for a St. Louis business covers what that runs and when it’s too early, and most owners writing a first release don’t need one.
One rule holds no matter how strong the angle gets. You’re offering, not asking for a favor, and never demanding one. No follow-up chain, no call to ask why it didn’t run, no request for a guarantee from anybody. Send the release, answer the phone, and go open the store.
Coverage is only one way strangers find you. Browse featured local business articles across St. Louis on St Louis Near Me Directory, see how other owners framed their own news, then search your own business name and read what a stranger reads.
If you run a St. Louis business with news to announce, this part is about the customers who come looking after the story runs. - Being the business people and AI name first is the game now, so list your business.
Frequently asked questions
What are the seven main parts of a press release?
Headline, dateline, lead paragraph, body, quote, boilerplate and contact information, in that order. The headline says what happened in plain words. The dateline gives your city and the release date. The lead carries the entire story in one sentence. The body adds supporting detail in descending importance. The quote adds a human voice. The boilerplate describes the business, and the contact block gives a name and a number somebody answers.
What is the proper format for a press release?
One page, roughly three hundred to five hundred words, pasted into the body of an email rather than attached as a designed file. Put FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE at the top, then the headline, then a dateline running into the first paragraph. Keep paragraphs to two or three sentences with a blank line between them. Close with a boilerplate paragraph, a contact block, and three pound signs centered at the end.
What not to do in a press release?
Don’t open with a slogan, and don’t hide the news in paragraph five behind company history. Skip words nobody can verify, like premier, leading or state-of-the-art. Avoid claims without a source, dates written as coming soon, and quotes that just restate the headline in a friendlier voice. Never send it with only a general inbox for contact, and never attach a large file or a link that needs a login.
How far in advance should you send out a press release?
For a dated event, a week or two ahead of time at minimum, and longer if a monthly publication is on your list, since those work a season out. For news that already happened, send it the same day you can confirm the facts. Weeklies publish on one fixed day, so count backward from that day. A television assignment desk can sometimes move inside a day, but only for something a camera can reach.
How to get press coverage for an event?
Send twice and give a camera something to point at. The first send goes out a week or two ahead so the event can make a calendar listing. The second is a short reminder a few days out carrying the start time, the street address, where to park and the name of one person who will be there and is willing to talk. An event with people moving beats a finished thing sitting still.
What are the basic rules for writing a press release?
Lead with what changed. Fit the who, what, when, where and why into the first two sentences, then arrange everything else in descending order of importance so the bottom can be cut without loss. Write in the third person, keep it to one page, and use only claims you can back up. Include one specific quote from a named person, a boilerplate paragraph, and a phone number that rings a human being.
What are the five Ws in a press release?
Who, what, when, where and why. Who is the named business or person, not a vague local company. What is the thing that changed, stated with a verb. When is an actual date. Where is a street, neighborhood or municipality specific enough for a desk to sort by geography. Why is the reason anyone outside your building should care, and it is the one most releases skip entirely.
Does a small business still need a press release at all?
Sometimes, and less often than people assume. A short personal email to one reporter does more work for most local news. The release earns its place when you need a written record several outlets can pull from at once, or when facts, dates, spellings and a quote have to stay identical everywhere. If your news fits in two sentences, send two sentences and offer more.
Written by a dedicated team of St. Louis locals who live, work, and play right here in the St. Louis metro. Founder Lane Forman and team are committed to building the region’s most trusted directory by verifying listings and connecting local businesses with loyal customers across Missouri and Illinois.