If Your PR Strategy Is Just a Press Release, You’re Not Doing Strategy
There is a particular comfort in the press release wire. It offers certainty in an industry increasingly defined by ambiguity. You write the announcement, secure approvals, pay the fee, hit “send” and call it distribution. The work is tangible. The process is familiar. And when nothing happens afterward, there is always a convenient explanation: the media landscape is broken.
But this is no longer a defensible position. If your communications strategy begins and ends with sending announcements over the wire, you are not practicing public relations. You are outsourcing judgment — and mistaking output for impact. This may sound harsh. It is also true.
Press releases were never meant to function as strategy. They were designed as tools — one instrument within a broader editorial and narrative system. Somewhere along the way, particularly as budgets tightened and client expectations accelerated, the industry collapsed that distinction.
What replaced strategy was procedure.
Today, many PR engagements consist of little more than announcement calendars, wire distribution and a quiet hope that something sticks. When it doesn’t, the blame is shifted outward: journalists don’t read releases anymore, newsrooms are shrinking, attention spans are shorter, algorithms are unfair.
All of that is true — and completely beside the point.
Shrinking newsrooms and limited attention do not make strategic thinking optional. They make it essential.
Clients are not wrong when they say they want more, faster and with less budget. They are responding to the same pressures every industry faces: compressed timelines, economic uncertainty and relentless competition for relevance.
What is wrong is how much of the PR industry has responded by offering less thinking at greater speed — and calling it efficiency. In practice, this means defaulting to wires because they feel like guaranteed distribution. It means confusing visibility with relevance. It means selling activity instead of outcomes.
The uncomfortable truth is that the wire often survives not because it works, but because it absolves practitioners from having to make hard editorial decisions. No one has to answer whether something is genuinely newsworthy. No one has to articulate why an announcement matters now, to whom and in what broader context. You can always say it was “sent.”
The claim that “journalists don’t read press releases anymore” is a convenient fiction. Journalists read what saves them time, sharpens their coverage and aligns with real audience interest. What they ignore is language that feels promotional, contextless or irrelevant.
A wire does not create news. It merely distributes it — assuming there was news to begin with.
This distinction matters. Too many PR professionals conflate dissemination with discovery. They treat announcements as inherently meaningful rather than as raw material that must be shaped into a story.
That is not a media problem. It is an editorial one.
Most failed PR does not fail at distribution. It fails long before anything is written. It fails when messaging is developed in isolation from business strategy. It fails when narrative positioning is an afterthought. It fails when executives are treated as quote machines rather than as public thinkers with coherent perspectives. It fails when PR is brought in after decisions are made, rather than while they are being shaped.
In these conditions, the press release becomes a fig leaf: a way to announce something without interrogating what it actually means. No wire service can fix that.
In an environment defined by speed and scarcity, the most valuable thing a PR professional can offer is not volume. It is judgment.
Judgment about what is worth saying and what is better left unsaid. Judgment about timing, framing, audience and consequence. Judgment about how a single announcement fits into a longer narrative arc. This is where communications professionals must return to its journalistic roots — not by pretending to be reporters, but by thinking like editors.
Editors ask different questions. They ask why something matters now. They ask who it affects. They ask what makes it distinct. They ask what it adds to an already crowded conversation. And crucially, they are willing to kill stories that do not meet that bar.
PR professionals who cannot say “this isn’t news” are not serving their clients. They are protecting their own deliverables. When clients say they want more with less, they are not asking for more wires. They are asking for clarity.
They want to know where to place bets. They want to understand reputational risk. They want narratives that travel without constant spending. They want their leaders to sound intelligent, coherent and relevant in public.
This is advisory work, not distribution work.
It requires PR professionals to engage earlier, think broader and operate closer to decision-making. It requires comfort with ambiguity and the confidence to challenge clients — including the courage to say that not every update deserves a press release.
Ironically, this kind of work often saves time and money. Fewer announcements, better stories, clearer positioning. Less noise. More signal.
None of this is an argument against press releases or wire services themselves. Used intentionally, they still serve important functions: regulatory disclosure, investor communications, formal record-keeping and targeted amplification.
The problem arises when the wire becomes the default rather than the decision.
When PR professionals stop designing communications strategies and start executing announcement pipelines, they cease to be strategic partners. They become logistics providers. That may feel safer. It is also far easier to replace.
The next era of public relations will not be won by those who can move fastest or distribute widest. It will be shaped by those who can think clearly under pressure, advise decisively and build narratives that compound over time.
That requires abandoning the illusion that activity equals value. It requires letting go of the comfort of the wire as a crutch. And it requires accepting that real strategy is sometimes slower, quieter and far more selective. The irony is that in a world demanding speed, the most powerful PR work often begins by stopping and asking a harder question:
Is this actually worth saying?
Until the industry is willing to ask, and answer, that question honestly, no amount of distribution will make its work meaningful.