ChatGPT Prompt Templates for Press Releases

Quick-Start (Copy This Right Now)

Picture this: you're a communications manager at a growing startup, your company just closed a funding round, and you have three hours before the announcement needs to go out to press contacts. You open ChatGPT and need a press release that sounds credible to a journalist who reads dozens of these a week and can spot a template from the first sentence.

Here's a starting structure for chatgpt press release prompts that avoids the most obvious tells of AI-generated press copy:

Write a press release announcing [specific news: funding round, product launch, partnership].
Key facts: [list the actual facts — amount, names, dates, specific details]
Don't open with "today, [company] announced" — journalists see this exact opening constantly and it signals a template. Instead, open with the single most newsworthy specific fact, stated plainly.
Include one direct quote from [name/title], but make it sound like something a real person would actually say out loud, not a marketing tagline with quotation marks around it.

What this does: banning the "today, [company] announced" opening addresses one of the most recognizable tells of a template-generated press release — it's technically correct but instantly signals formulaic writing to anyone who reads press releases regularly. Asking for a quote that sounds "said out loud" pushes back against ChatGPT's default tendency to generate quotes that read like tagline copy rather than actual human speech.

⚡ Pro tip: Read any generated quote out loud before using it. If it sounds like something you'd see on a billboard rather than something a person would say in a normal conversation, it needs a rewrite — real executive quotes, even polished ones, still sound like speech.

Understanding the Variables

The "single most newsworthy fact" instruction requires you to actually know what's newsworthy, which isn't always obvious from inside the company. The amount of a funding round might feel like the headline fact internally, but a journalist covering the space might care more about which specific investors joined, or what the funding unlocks strategically — and the version of the press release that leads with what a journalist would find genuinely interesting gets picked up more often than the version that leads with what the company is proudest of.

⚡ Pro tip: Before finalizing which fact leads the release, ask ChatGPT directly: "If a journalist covering this industry only had time to include one fact from this release in their story, which one would it most likely be, and why?" The answer sometimes differs from what the company assumed was the headline.

Step-by-Step: Building a Full Press Release

Step 1: Identify the actual news hook.

Here are the facts: [list everything]. What's the specific, newsworthy hook here — not the general category of news (funding, launch, partnership), but the specific detail that makes this particular instance interesting?

Step 2: Draft around that hook.

Write the release with that specific hook as the opening. Keep the headline under 12 words, and make sure it states the hook directly rather than teasing it.

Step 3: Add a boilerplate paragraph that doesn't repeat the company website's About page verbatim.

Write a one-paragraph company boilerplate for the end of this release. Don't just restate our tagline — describe specifically what the company does in plain language a reporter unfamiliar with us could understand and use.

A comms lead at a healthtech startup used this three-step process for a product launch release. Her first instinct — and her team's habitual approach — was to lead with the product's full feature list. The identified hook, once she ran Step 1, turned out to be a specific clinical outcome the product had already demonstrated in a pilot, which made for a far more compelling headline than a generic feature announcement would have.

Pro-Level Variations

For a press release responding to a less flattering situation — a product recall, a data incident, a leadership change following controversy — a different, more careful structure is needed:

This release needs to address [situation] directly. Don't minimize it with vague language like "we take this seriously" without specifics. State clearly what happened, in plain terms, and what specific action is being taken.
Avoid corporate hedging phrases that a skeptical reporter would flag as evasive.

⚡ Pro tip: For any sensitive announcement, have ChatGPT draft the release, then separately ask it to read the draft "as a skeptical reporter looking for evasive language" and flag anything that reads as vague or defensive. This catch step often surfaces phrasing that felt fine while writing it but reads as evasive to an outside reader.

A nonprofit's communications director uses a related approach for statements responding to public criticism, asking ChatGPT to draft the statement and then separately list every claim in it that isn't backed by a specific fact — a discipline that keeps statements from leaning on vague reassurance during moments when specificity actually matters most.

Writing for Different Outlets and Reporter Types

A press release rarely goes to just one audience — a trade publication reporter, a general business journalist, and a local news outlet all care about different aspects of the same news. Rather than writing one release and hoping it lands for everyone, some communications teams adapt the pitch angle for different outlet types while keeping the core facts consistent.

Here's the core press release: [paste release]
Adapt the opening and headline for 3 different reporter types: a trade publication reporter who cares about industry-specific implications, a general business reporter who cares about the broader market story, and a local news reporter who cares about community impact (jobs, local investment).
Keep the underlying facts identical across all three — only the framing and emphasis should change.

What this does: the same underlying news genuinely matters differently to different beats, and a pitch email to a trade reporter that leads with local job creation, or a pitch to a local reporter that leads with technical industry implications, misses what that specific reporter's readers actually care about. Adapting the framing — not the facts — for each outlet type increases the odds of an actual pickup.

⚡ Pro tip: When pitching multiple reporter types, never send the identical email to all of them — reporters at outlets covering similar territory sometimes compare notes, and identical outreach with no acknowledgment of their specific beat reads as a mass blast rather than a considered pitch.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Issue: quotes still sound like marketing copy despite instructions. Fix: give ChatGPT an example of how the actual person speaks — a transcript excerpt from an interview or a natural sentence they've said before. Without a real reference point, it defaults to generic "we're thrilled" language regardless of instructions.

Issue: the release reads as too promotional even after removing obvious marketing language. Fix: check whether the release includes any unverifiable superlatives — "leading," "innovative," "best-in-class" — without a specific source or comparison backing them up. Journalists are trained to strip these automatically, and including them signals the release wasn't written with an editor's eye in mind.

⚠️ Common mistake: writing a press release before confirming the news is actually newsworthy to anyone outside the company. Not every internal milestone justifies a press release, and sending one that isn't genuinely newsworthy to journalists on a beat wastes the relationship for the next release that actually matters.

Preparing the Media Kit Alongside the Release

A press release rarely goes out alone — journalists working under deadline often need supporting materials quickly, and having them ready alongside the release itself can be the difference between a pickup and a pass.

Based on this press release: [paste release]
Draft a short list of 3-4 follow-up questions a journalist would likely have after reading this, along with a one-sentence answer to each — the kind of quick-reference material that helps a reporter write the story faster without needing a follow-up call.

What this does: anticipating a journalist's likely follow-up questions and having answers ready lowers the friction of covering the story, which matters more than most companies realize when a reporter is choosing between several stories to cover on a tight deadline. A story that requires an extra round of emails to get basic clarifying details answered is easier to deprioritize than one where the necessary context is already at hand.

⚡ Pro tip: Keep the anticipated Q&A separate from the release itself, as a companion document, rather than trying to cram every possible detail into the release. A release bloated with pre-emptive answers to questions nobody's asked yet becomes harder to read, not more helpful.

Your Turn

Next time you need a press release fast, resist the default "today, [company] announced" template and start by identifying the specific fact a journalist would actually find interesting. Build the release around that hook, get the quote to sound like real speech, adapt the pitch angle for different outlet types without changing the underlying facts, and stress-test sensitive announcements against a skeptical-reporter read before sending. Save the hook-identification and skeptical-review prompts somewhere reusable — PromptABCD keeps templates like these ready so a tight deadline doesn't force you back into the generic template you're trying to avoid.