A press and media page

Who actually uses it

Rarely a national journalist. More often a local publication, a trade directory, a partner writing a case study, an event organizer needing a biography, or a supplier building a page about their customers.

All of them are about to publish something about your business, and a person or an answer engine will make something up if the facts are not easy to find. The page exists to prevent that.

Increasingly it is also read by systems summarizing your business. Our page on entity clarity covers why one authoritative source for your facts prevents confident wrong answers.

What to put on it

The exact legal and trading names, spelled the way you want them. What the business does in one sentence and in a paragraph. When it started, where it operates and who runs it.

Then the assets. A logo in a usable format, photographs of the premises or the work, and headshots of anybody who might be named. State plainly that these may be used.

And a contact route for media enquiries specifically, even if it reaches the same person as everything else. It signals that enquiries are welcome rather than an intrusion.

Write the boilerplate for them

A short standard paragraph describing the business is the single most useful thing on the page, because it is what gets copied. Writing it yourself means it is accurate and says what you want.

Keep two versions, one sentence and one paragraph. Publications have different space, and giving them a choice means they use yours rather than writing their own.

Check it against how you describe yourself elsewhere. A boilerplate that disagrees with your about page creates exactly the inconsistency our page on entity clarity warns about.

What a press page should hold

The list below is what somebody writing about you needs. Every item missing is either a phone call to you or a detail somebody guesses at and gets wrong.

• Legal and trading names, spelled exactly
• One sentence and one paragraph describing the business
• Founding date and a brief history
• Who runs it, with roles and headshots
• Logo files and photographs cleared for use
• A media contact route
• Any awards, memberships or accreditations, with dates

Images and permission

Say explicitly what may be used and how. Publications will not chase permission, and an unclear licence means your photographs are either used without asking or not used at all.

Only publish images you actually own or have cleared. Our page on images and copyright covers why a photographer's contract often keeps rights you assumed you had.

Provide them at a usable size. A logo that only exists as a small image on a homepage is the reason your brand appears blurry in somebody else's article.

Claims and accreditations

This page is where overstated claims do the most damage, because they get repeated by somebody else with your name attached. Everything on it must be currently true and evidenced.

Date any award or membership. An accreditation from six years ago presented without a date reads as current, and being described that way by a publication is your problem rather than theirs.

Our page on honest claims covers the general rules. Nothing here is legal advice, and repeated claims are harder to correct than published ones.

Keeping it accurate

Review it yearly and after any change of staff, address or accreditation. A press page is written once and then forgotten more reliably than any other page on a business site.

Put a review date on it so a reader can judge how current it is. That single line does more for credibility than anything else you could add to the page.

And use it yourself. When you send anybody your details, send the link rather than retyping them, which keeps one version authoritative and keeps you noticing when it goes stale.