Editorial Guidelines
"News writing should be clear, concise, accurate, and interesting." The Associated Press Guide to News Writing
Before you submit your first press release
Before you get started, it's important to understand what we look for in a press release. Our editorial guidelines are designed help your press release get speedy approval and distribution. The use of PR Leap is subject to these guidelines and our
Terms of Service. We review all press releases before distribution to ensure, to the best of our ability, that the content is accurate, honest and newsworthy.
News Angle, Structure and Style - Based on our observations, press releases that contain a clear, timely, and interesting news angle; are written in news style; and follow the inverted pyramid structure--return the best results in terms of attention, SERPs, traffic and sales leads.
News Style - Style is the way you establish credibility with your audience. Credibility is key to effective communication. News style is used for writing press releases. It encompasses vocabulary, sentence structure, and how you present the information to your audience in terms of relative importance and tone.
Inverted Pyramid Structure - Inverted pyramid structure means writing from most important to least important facts and answering the following questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?
Tone - Your mission is to establish credibility with your audience so that it sees your message as truthful, reliable, and believable. The tone of your press release plays a large role in establishing it's credibility.
A press release should never sound like an advertisement. It shouldn't include any claims of your product/service as being revolutionary, amazing, out of this world. Use of upper case characters to create emphasis and exclamation marks is a sign of hyperbole. Remember, news writing is not copywriting.
Quotes - News is written in third person. The only time your press release should contain pronouns such as "I," "we," "us," "you," "your," etc. is when you are quoting a spokesperson. Opinions should only be expressed inside quotation marks.
Active Words. Strong Words and Phrases - Use active words to make your writing more interesting. Use strong words and phrases that engage the reader's attention.
Content Features and Qualities
Newsworthy Content - For your press release to be considered newsworthy it must have a clear and interesting news angle. The angle is the story hook; the news event; the controlling issue; the reason your audience should want to read your story.
Legally Accurate - All press releases referencing legal action or criminal matters must include a case number, court of record, complaint number or other means of documentation that we can verify.
Valid Contact Info - All press releases must contain a valid phone number and e-mail address in the contact information.
Length Matters - Your press release should contain between 200 and 800 words. Press releases that are to short or to long typically do not get indexed by search engines.
Grammar and Spelling - First impressions matter. Choose grammar carefully. Your message must be understood by your audience. Your press release should be free of spelling and grammatical errors.
PR Leap Formatting - Your press release should be free of any HTML tags and other formatting such as bold, italics and tables. Use the following example to create Keyword Anchor Text: [url=http://www.yourwebsite.com']Your Text[/url].
PR Leap does not distribute:
Please do not submit advertisements, articles, reader opinion pieces, reprints, fiction or blog posts.
Online Gambling - We do not accept press releases that promote or link to online gambling sites and related sites.
Sexually Explicit Content - We do not accept press releases that promote adult content or services, hate or violence-oriented, suggest racial intolerance, advocate against any individual, have insulting-obscene-degrading tone, or contain profanity.
Weapons, Firearms, Ammunitions - We do not accept press releases that contain information on: hacking/cracking, auto-surf programs or promotion of bomb creation, support for terrorism / radicalism / religious fanaticism, illicit drugs or drug paraphernalia, steroid use or advocacy, weapon / firearms / ammunition.
Link SPAM - We believe anchor text links when used judiciously improve the readability of a press release. Please only include 1 link per every 100 words.
Intent to Harm - All press releases must not contain any content, products, services or other information that, in PR Leap's reasonable determination, may be illegal to sell under any applicable law, statute, ordinance or regulation, that may infringe or violate anyone's rights, or that, PR Leap believes, in its sole discretion, is inflammatory, offensive, or otherwise inconsistent with the spirit of PR Leap.
