Press release to news brief

1. Paste the full press release — headline, body, quotes and boilerplate.
2. Press Generate brief and wait a few seconds.
3. Read the five sections: a neutral summary, key facts with figures, the best verbatim quote, suggested angles, and what still needs verifying.
4. Copy the brief into your notes or CMS and start reporting from it.

The brief is a starting point for a journalist, not a publishable article. It is built only from the words you paste.

1. Decide whether there is a story

Most releases are not news. Ask what has actually changed, whether it is new, whether it can be verified, and whether it matters to your readers rather than to the issuer's marketing team. An appointment, an award or a rebrand is rarely a story on its own; a price rise, a closure, a job loss, a safety finding, a regulatory filing or a funding round with real numbers usually is.

2. Strip the PR framing

Reduce the release to its verifiable facts: who, what, when, where, how many and on whose authority. Delete “leading”, “innovative”, “world-class”, “excited to announce” and every unattributed superlative. What remains is your raw material — and if very little remains, that is your answer to step one.

3. Attribute, don't assert

A claim in a release is the issuer's claim until you have checked it. Write “the company said”, “according to the trust's own figures”, “the department claims”. Keep the attribution close to the claim, in the same sentence where possible, so a reader skimming the first two paragraphs cannot mistake a company projection for an established fact.

4. Rebuild it as an inverted pyramid

Lead with the most consequential fact and its human consequence, not with the organisation's name. Put the essential context in the second or third paragraph: the previous figure, the comparable period, the wider trend. Quotes support the story — they should not carry it.

5. Add the context the release left out

Percentages without baselines, records without timeframes, savings without the costs, surveys without sample sizes or sponsors: these omissions are usually deliberate. Find the previous year's number, the sector average, the regulator's published data, the last set of accounts. This is the reporting that makes a story yours rather than the issuer's.

6. Get a second voice and put the question

Speak to somebody affected, an independent expert or a critic, and give the issuer the obvious hard question before you publish. A single sentence of independent comment is often the difference between a rewritten release and journalism.

7. Check the embargo and the legal risk

Confirm when the embargo lifts in your own timezone, verify names, titles, figures and dates against a primary source, and treat allegations, health claims and financial statements with the care your title's legal guidance requires.

The model is instructed to use only what is in the pasted text, to attribute claims to the issuing organisation, to quote verbatim and to flag gaps rather than fill them. Anything the release does not say should appear in “what to verify”, not in the summary.

That is a constraint, not a guarantee. AI output can still misread emphasis, compress a caveat out of existence or mis-attribute a quote, and it has no way of knowing whether the release itself is accurate. Read the brief against the original, verify every figure, name, title and date with a primary source, and treat the output as a reporter's starting point — never as publishable copy.

Your text is not stored. It is forwarded once to the model to produce your brief and then discarded; we keep only anonymous usage counters so the tool can stay free.