How do I use AI to write a professional press release when I can't afford a PR firm?
Claude (claude.ai), ChatGPT, or any capable AI assistant can generate a publish-ready press release from a short bullet list of your news in under five minutes — you don't need an agency to get this done. For broader distribution once the release is written, free tools like PR.com or EIN Presswire can push it to hundreds of outlets at no cost.
A press release has a predictable structure that AI handles well: headline, dateline, lead paragraph answering who/what/when/where/why, a quote from an executive, two body paragraphs with supporting detail, and a boilerplate "About" section at the bottom. If you give an AI tool like Claude or ChatGPT a bulleted summary of your news — what happened, who's involved, key numbers, and a quote you want attributed to yourself — it will assemble those pieces in AP Style format that editors recognize and respect. The whole process takes about 10 minutes once you know what you want to say. The most common mistake small business owners make is writing a press release that sounds like a marketing brochure rather than a news story. Editors will delete anything that reads as "we are thrilled to announce" without a real news hook. A good rule of thumb: if your news contains a concrete number (first 100 customers, $500K in funding, 10 new jobs, 15 years in business), lead with that number in the headline. AI tools are good at enforcing this discipline — just tell the tool "lead with the most newsworthy concrete fact." For distribution, start with your local newspaper's online tip form and any trade publications relevant to your industry before paying for a wire service. Most local editors are actively looking for legitimate small business news stories and will cover a well-written release at no cost. Free distribution services like PR.com and EIN Presswire can syndicate your release to hundreds of smaller outlets and news aggregators, which helps it appear in Google News. Paid services like PR Newswire ($250 and up per release) or Globe Newswire reach larger newsrooms, but they are rarely worth it for local small business announcements. Once you have a release AI wrote, read it aloud before sending. If any sentence sounds like it was written by a committee rather than a person, rewrite it. Editors can spot AI-generated corporate speak immediately — your job is to make it sound like a real human being wrote something genuinely worth covering.