Crafting Great Media Releases
About this course
A practical, self-paced course on writing media releases that get used, get the facts right, and still hold up when the full story is known.
In a lot of communities, your media release isn't a request for coverage. It is the coverage. Newsrooms have fewer reporters than they did a decade ago, local papers keep closing, and what your organization sends out often runs close to word for word, gets summarized in a newsletter, or turns up in a search result years later. That makes the release one of the most important things a government communicator writes, and one of the easiest to get quietly wrong.
This course works through the job in the order you actually do it: deciding whether something is a release at all, structuring it so the news survives a reader who stops after one paragraph, writing headlines and leads that say plainly who did what, getting it through review without losing accuracy or time, pitching it to the right reporter, and supplying photos, video and audio that are honest and accessible.
Each lesson draws on real cases, including the first official accounts of George Floyd's and Tyre Nichols' deaths, a data release that went out 31 minutes early, and a handout photo pulled by the world's news photo services, to show what happens to a release once it meets the full record. Each one ends with an exercise you can do with your own organization's releases, and the course includes templates, a distribution checklist and a headline worksheet to use at your desk.
Who This Course Is For:
- Government communicators who write or approve media releases and want them to be used more, and questioned less
- People new to public information work who need a solid, practical grounding in release writing
- Experienced communicators who want a shared standard, and a set of tools, for everyone in the office who drafts releases
Read a sample from this course
The release that becomes the story
It's twenty to five on a Thursday. The new overnight warming center opens on Monday, leadership has signed off, and you send the release to your media list and post it on the website before you leave. The next morning the local weekly has it online. You recognize the second paragraph, because you wrote it. You recognize the quote, because you drafted that too. The byline belongs to a reporter who, as far as you can tell, never called.
Some communicators feel quietly pleased when that happens and some feel slightly uneasy. Both reactions are right. It means the release did its job, and it also means that for a lot of residents, your words were the only account of that story they ever saw.
This isn't new, and it isn't a sign of lazy journalism. When the Pew Research Center tracked every news story produced in Baltimore over a single week in 2009, it found that 63% of the stories were initiated by government officials, with police leading the way, and that official releases often appeared word for word in first accounts of events, frequently without being labeled as such. (Pew Research Center, 2010) Government has been the starting point for a large share of local news for a long time.
What has changed is how few people are left on the other end to check, question and add to what you send. Northwestern University's Medill State of Local News report found that 136 newspapers disappeared in the year to October 2025, that 213 US counties now have no local news source at all, and that roughly 50 million Americans live in counties with only one. Nearly 3,500 newspapers have vanished since 2005. (Nieman Lab, October 2025)
Put those two findings together and the job looks different. A media release isn't a request for a reporter to go and find out what happened. In many communities it's the first draft of the public record, and sometimes the only draft. This course is about writing that draft well enough to deserve the trust it's being given.
What you'll learn
Course Curriculum
Full access upon enrollment- 1.The release that becomes the story
- 2.What a media release is actually for
- 3.Release, advisory or brief
- 4.When to issue one, and when to hold back
- 5.Format, pitch and follow-up
- 6.Try this with your last ten releases
- 7.You're writing the first draft of the record
- 8.Sources & further reading
Course Resources
Available after enrollment
Course details
- Self-paced
- Certificate of completion
- Lifetime access
- 6 lessons · 48 sections
- 3 downloadable resources