Press Release Dos and Don’ts

Here’s the quick version, because you’re probably about to send one: a health press release works when it hands a journalist a story they’d have wanted anyway, backed by evidence and a real expert, and it fails when it announces something only you care about. Most land in the second camp. Below is the do-and-don’t checklist we run against every release before it goes out.

This isn’t the full how-to. It’s the list of things that quietly kill a release, and the handful that save it. If you want the step-by-step build, that’s our guide to writing a health press release. This is the sense-check.

The dos

Do lead with the story, not the announcement. “We’ve launched a new supplement” is not news. “New data shows protein timing matters more than total intake for over-50s” is, and your product can sit inside it. Ask what a health editor could run without embarrassment. Start there.

Do put a named, qualified expert front and centre. Journalists quote people, not brands. A physiotherapist, a registered nutritionist, a doctor with a clear specialism, someone who can say something precise and stand behind it. One client’s whole programme runs on a single named practitioner, and that’s why the placements keep coming.

Do cite the evidence. Link the study. Give the sample size, the year, the journal. Health desks are burned often enough that a claim without a source gets deleted. A claim with one gets read.

Do respect embargoes. If you offer a story under embargo, honour it to the minute, and never quietly hand the same “exclusive” to three outlets. Journalists talk. Break it once and you lose the relationship that took a year to build.

Do write for one specific desk. A release aimed at the health editor of one title, referencing what they actually cover, beats a blast to 400 addresses. We’ve seen a single, well-targeted pitch travel further than any mass send, picked up across multiple titles because the angle was right, not because the list was long.

The don’ts

Don’t make health claims you can’t back. This is the one that bites hardest. “Clinically proven,” “cures,” “guarantees”: in the UK the ASA and, for anything medicine-adjacent, the MHRA read those as advertising claims, and the FTC does the same in the US. A press release is not a safe space to overreach. Describe what a product is for and let the evidence and the expert do the rest.

Don’t bury the news under a company paragraph. If your opening line is about your founding year and your mission, the journalist is already gone. The story goes first. The boilerplate goes at the bottom, where it belongs.

Don’t write it like an ad. Adjectives don’t earn coverage. “Revolutionary,” “game-changing,” “market-leading”: every one of those tells an editor this is marketing, not news. Flat, factual, specific language reads as credible. Hype reads as a reason to stop.

Don’t send to everyone. A 400-name blast with your recipient’s name spelled wrong is worse than sending nothing. It marks you as someone who doesn’t read the outlet, which is exactly the person a journalist ignores.

Don’t chase with “did you get my release?” Follow up with something useful (a new data point, an offer of the expert for a quick call), or don’t follow up at all. A nudge that adds nothing just confirms you’re a nuisance.

The health-specific bit most releases miss

In health, credibility is the whole game. A single unsupported claim doesn’t just get one release spiked; it tells that journalist to treat your next ten with suspicion. The brands that win coverage consistently are the ones that never make the editor do a risk assessment. They send stories that are already safe to run.

That’s the thread through every do and don’t here: give a health journalist a story they can publish without checking their back. If you want that done for you, this is what a media relations programme is built to do, and it sits inside our wider healthcare and medical PR work.