# Newsworthiness: What Makes a Release News Instead of Noise

Journalists delete 200 releases a day. The surviving ones answer a question the journalist's *readers* already have. This is the filter to run before writing a single sentence — and the fixes when the answer is "not yet news".

## The newsworthiness test (need ≥2)

- **First/biggest/only** — a superlative that survives fact-checking (not "leading provider of solutions")
- **Numbers nobody has** — original data, real customer scale, money raised/generated
- **Conflict or stakes** — displaces an incumbent, challenges a norm, regulatory angle
- **Timing hook** — attaches to something already in the news cycle
- **Genuinely novel capability** — passes the "could competitors have said this last year?" test

A feature launch usually scores zero. That's not a writing problem — don't write the release; find the story around it (below).

## Turning announcements into stories

| You have | The story is |
|---|---|
| A feature launch | The customer whose measurable life changed + the trend it rides |
| A funding round | What the market believes now that it didn't (the round is evidence, not story) |
| A partnership | What buyers can do Tuesday that they couldn't Monday |
| A milestone | The original data behind it ("analysing our 10M runs, we found…") |

## Structure that survives the skim

- **Headline** ≤12 words, a claim not a description ("X cuts onboarding fraud 40% for mid-size banks" beats "X announces new platform capabilities")
- **First paragraph** = the whole story: who, what, the number, why now. Journalists rewrite from paragraph one; everything below is supporting material
- **Quotes say what facts can't** — opinion, stakes, colour. A quote restating the paragraph above it ("We're thrilled to…") is deleted first. Give the exec a *claim to defend*, give the customer a *before/after*
- **Boilerplate** is one tight paragraph with one number, updated quarterly, never the story's overflow

## The verification pass

Everything must survive a hostile fact-check: superlatives sourced, numbers dated and reproducible, customer quotes approved in writing. One inflated claim converts the whole release — and the sender — to spam.
