ChatGPT Prompt to Write a Press Release

What You Are Working With

A regional craft brewery has just spent nine months and 40 trial batches getting a zero-alcohol IPA to taste like an IPA instead of wet cardboard. The canning line is booked. The distributor wants the announcement by Friday. The local food editor wants a one-page release by Thursday morning. You are the founder, not a PR agency, and you have never written a press release in your life. Here is the quiet advantage: a press release is one of the most formulaic documents in business, which makes it exactly the kind of task a well-constrained prompt can finish in a single pass.

This walkthrough gives you one complete prompt that produces a submission-ready release for a zero-alcohol product launch, the fields you must replace, the shape of the output to expect, and the tweaks that adapt the same skeleton to a funding round, a taproom opening, or a seasonal limited release.

The Full Prompt, Ready to Paste

Paste the block below into ChatGPT. Swap every {{...}} token for your own details and keep the numbered rules intact so the model returns the same structure every time.

You are a public relations writer with 15 years of experience covering food and beverage trade media. Write a press release announcing a new product for a regional craft brewery.

Company: {{COMPANY}}
City: {{CITY}}
Product: {{PRODUCT}}
One-line pitch: {{PITCH}}
Launch date: {{DATE}}
Target media: {{MEDIA}}
Founder quote direction: {{QUOTE}}
Availability: {{AVAILABILITY}}

Rules:
1. Use the standard structure: headline, dateline, lead paragraph, body, founder quote, retailer quote, boilerplate, media contact.
2. Keep the entire release under 450 words.
3. The lead paragraph must answer who, what, when, where, and why in two sentences.
4. Write in third person. Never use first person or the word I.
5. Include exactly one founder quote and one independent buyer quote.
6. Do not exaggerate. Avoid the words revolutionary, game-changing, and world-class.
7. Close with a three-sentence boilerplate and a media contact placeholder.
8. Below the release, list three story angles a journalist could pursue.

The role sentence matters more than it looks. Naming the beat and the medium (“food and beverage trade media”) keeps the model from drifting into consumer-blog fluff. The word-count ceiling forces tighter editing than most humans manage on the first try.

Placeholders to Fill In

Two tokens do the heavy lifting. {{PITCH}} is your headline in disguise, so write it as a benefit a stranger would repeat at a bar. {{QUOTE}} is where generic releases die, because a quote with no direction produces a bland sentence about being excited. Give the model a specific idea to argue and the quote will carry a real opinion.

What Good Output Looks Like

ChatGPT returns a formatted release plus a short angle list. A trimmed version of the expected shape:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Rivertown Fermenting Co. Launches Zero-Alcohol IPA That Tastes Like the Real Thing

ASHEVILLE, N.C., March 4 - Rivertown Fermenting Co. today released Rivertown Zero IPA, a
zero-alcohol India pale ale built on the same hop bill as its flagship. The brewery spent nine
months and 40 test batches to reach full-strength flavor without alcohol.

The new release answers a growing demand: drinkers who want the taste of craft beer without the
alcohol...

"The hard part was never removing the alcohol," said founder ... "It was keeping the bitterness
and aroma that our regulars recognize."

...retailer quote...

Angle ideas for journalists:
1. How a regional brewery engineered flavor after removing alcohol.
2. The sober-curious market as a growth channel for small brewers.
3. What 40 test batches say about product development on a craft scale.

You should see a dateline, a lead that fits in two sentences, and two attributed quotes that sound like two different people. If the quotes read the same, tighten {{QUOTE}} and tell the model who the second speaker is.

Why the Prompt Is Built This Way

Three choices do the work. First, the format list (“headline, dateline, lead paragraph…”) gives the model a checklist, and releases are graded on completeness far more than on cleverness. Second, the third-person rule removes the single most common amateur tell: releases that suddenly say “we are thrilled.” Third, the anti-hype rule (“avoid revolutionary, game-changing, world-class”) blocks the default AI vocabulary that editors delete on sight. Together they turn a chat response into a document you can attach to an email without a rewrite.

Mistakes That Get Releases Ignored

• Burying the news in paragraph three. Editors read the first two sentences and stop. If your lead does not state the product, the date, and the market, the release is dead.
• Quotes that could belong to anyone. A quote is only worth including if it contains an opinion or a number that no competitor could say.
• No contact details. The model outputs a placeholder, but you must replace it with a real name and email. A release without a contact cannot be followed up.
• Pasting the release only as an attachment. Put the text inline in the email body and keep the file as a backup; many editors work from phones.
• Shipping with zero angles. The angle list is a gift to busy journalists. Leaving it out wastes the prompt’s best feature.

Twists and Adaptations

• Funding announcement: change the role to “business wire reporter” and add “State the round size, lead investor, and intended use of funds in the lead.”
• Taproom opening: swap the product tokens for address, opening date, and capacity, then ask for a first-look angle instead of a product angle.
• Seasonal release: add a rule that the second paragraph must explain why this batch is limited and how long it lasts.
• Two languages: ask for the English release first, then “produce a Spanish version that keeps the same structure and does not translate brand names.”
• Localized pitch: add “Write the headline for a regional outlet, not a national wire” to keep the tone intimate.

If drafting feels slow, front-load your facts into one messy paragraph and tell the model to pull the structure from it. For related drafting patterns, see How to Draft a Blog Post with ChatGPT, and if your brand voice keeps wobbling between drafts, pair this with Brand Voice Prompts Compared. For announcements that go out by newsletter instead of wire, read AI Prompts for Newsletters.

Sources & Notes

Prompt pattern written for ChatGPT (GPT-4o and later) and portable to Claude and Gemini with minor wording changes. The structure mirrors the conventional press release layout used by food and beverage trade media as of 2024-2025. Tested behavior: an explicit word cap plus an anti-hype list reliably trims the filler sentences that models add by default. No external data was fetched and the example output is illustrative, not a real announcement. Replace every placeholder before sending, and confirm the launch date and availability details against your production calendar.