Week 18: Public Relations

Learning objectives

By the end of this week, you will be able to:

1. Explain, in plain language, what public relations is and how it differs from advertising.
2. Describe the standard structure of a press release: headline, dateline, lead paragraph, supporting quotes, boilerplate, and contact information.
3. Draft a press release with AI while verifying every stated fact against a real source.
4. Write a short, specific media pitch email aimed at one journalist's particular audience, applying clear, professional email habits such as a direct subject line and a respectful tone.
5. Explain the basic principles of crisis communication, including why both silence and over-promising are risky.
6. Describe how AI can help draft a fast first crisis response while a human still reviews and approves it before release.
7. Identify special considerations for nonprofit and advocacy-group public relations, including honest, respectful storytelling.
8. Apply a four-point checklist to review any AI-drafted public relations material before it is published, including a check of the finished document's accessible structure.

Lesson

Public relations is a new phrase for skills you have already been building throughout this course. You have practiced drafting clearly with AI, verifying every fact before you trust it, and writing emails aimed at one specific reader. This week takes those same skills and points them at a new professional field. Public relations is a natural place to focus this practice, because a public relations professional's daily work, drafting a short factual document, checking every claim inside it, and writing a short email to exactly the right person, is very close to skills you have already been building. This week simply gives that work its professional name and its professional structure.

What Public Relations Is

Public relations, often shortened to the two letters PR, is the practice of managing how an organization, a person, or a cause is seen and understood by people outside it. A public relations professional's main job is building relationships with journalists, editors, bloggers, and other trusted messengers, and giving them accurate, useful information so that they choose, on their own, to tell a story about the organization. That story might announce a new program, explain a change in a service, celebrate an achievement, or respond honestly to a problem. Whatever the topic, the goal of public relations stays the same: earn accurate coverage and build public trust over time, one true statement at a time.

Public relations touches almost every kind of organization. A hospital uses public relations to explain a new health service to local reporters. A small business uses public relations to get a write-up in a local newspaper when it opens. A nonprofit uses public relations to explain why its cause matters and how the public can help. A government office uses public relations to explain a change in a public service. In every one of these examples, the organization is not paying to have the story told. It is earning that coverage by giving a journalist or editor something genuinely worth writing about.

Public Relations Versus Advertising: Earning Coverage, Not Buying It

It helps to understand public relations by comparing it with advertising. Advertising means paying a media outlet or a platform directly for space or time to say exactly what you want to say, in the exact words you choose. If a business buys a radio spot or a banner ad on a website, that is advertising. The business controls every word, and the outlet runs it because it was paid to, not because an editor judged it newsworthy on its own.

Public relations works differently. In public relations, no payment changes hands for a specific news story. Instead, a public relations professional gives a journalist or editor accurate, well-organized information and lets that independent person decide, using their own judgment, whether the story is worth telling to their own audience. Because the coverage was earned rather than bought, readers tend to trust it more than they trust an advertisement, since they know an independent journalist chose to tell the story.

This difference comes with an important trade-off. An advertisement gives an organization full control over the final wording. Earned public relations coverage does not. A journalist may quote only part of what you send, ask follow-up questions you did not expect, or decide the story is not newsworthy at all. Because you do not control the final result, every fact you give a journalist has to be completely accurate. If a claim in your press release turns out to be false, the journalist who repeated it in good faith looks bad too, and that damages trust on both sides for a long time afterward.

The Standard Structure of a Press Release

A press release is a short, factual, written announcement sent to journalists and other media contacts, describing genuine news about an organization. Press releases follow a standard structure that has stayed stable for decades, which is worth learning well, since a well-organized release is far more likely to be read all the way through by a busy journalist.

The headline sits at the very top. A good press release headline states the real news in one clear, specific sentence, without exaggeration or marketing language. "Local Nonprofit Opens Free Reading Center" is a strong headline. "Amazing New Center Will Change Everything Forever" is not, because it promises more than the facts support and sounds like an advertisement rather than news.

The dateline comes next, directly before the first paragraph. A dateline states the city, and often the state, the release is issued from, followed by the date, usually written like this: RIVER CITY, OHIO, September 3, 2026. The dateline tells a journalist, at a glance, where and when this news originates.

The lead paragraph, sometimes called the lede, comes right after the dateline, and it is the single most important paragraph in the whole release. A strong lead paragraph answers five questions in two to four sentences: who is involved, what is happening, when it is happening, where it is happening, and why it matters. These five questions are often called the five W's. Busy journalists frequently read only the lead paragraph before deciding whether a story is worth pursuing further, so every one of the five W's needs to appear clearly, with the single most important fact coming first, not buried in the middle.

After the lead paragraph, a press release usually includes one or two supporting quotes: short statements attributed by name to a real person connected to the organization, such as its director or a person directly affected by the news. A good quote adds a human voice and a reason the news matters, in a way a plain factual sentence cannot. It should sound like something a real person would actually say out loud, not like more marketing copy dressed up with quotation marks.

Near the bottom sits the boilerplate, a short, standard "about" paragraph describing the organization itself: what it does, who it serves, and how long it has existed. The word boilerplate refers to a paragraph reused, largely unchanged, from one press release to the next, so a journalist encountering the organization for the first time gets a quick, consistent introduction to who is speaking.

Finally, every press release ends with contact information: the name, title, phone number, and email address of a real person a journalist can reach for more detail or an interview. Skipping this final piece is a common and costly mistake, since a journalist with a question and no way to reach anyone will often simply set the story aside.

Drafting a Press Release With AI: Keeping Every Fact Accurate

AI is an excellent drafting partner for a press release, because it already knows the standard structure just described and can organize your facts into that structure quickly. But an essential lesson applies here with extra force: AI tools can hallucinate, meaning they can state something confidently that is not actually true. A hallucinated fact in an ordinary conversation is a nuisance you can catch and correct privately. A hallucinated fact in a press release can end up printed by a journalist, repeated by other outlets, and read by thousands of people, all believing it came directly from you.

The safest way to draft a press release with AI is to give the AI tool every fact yourself, in a short bulleted list, before asking it to write anything. Instead of asking an AI tool to "write a press release about our new program" and hoping it invents accurate details on its own, give it the real who, what, when, where, and why in your own words first, then ask it to organize those exact facts into the standard structure. This keeps the AI tool working in its strongest role, organizing and phrasing information clearly, rather than its weakest role, inventing information it does not actually have.

Once the draft comes back, verify it the same way you should verify any AI output: read it in full using Say All, or your screen reader's continuous reading command, and check every single fact, every name, every date, every number, and every quote, against your original source list, one item at a time. Pay special attention to quotes. Never let an AI tool invent words and attribute them to a real, named person. If a quote appears in the draft credited to a real person, that person needs to see it and approve it, in their own words, before the release goes out. This is not an optional courtesy. Publishing invented words under a real person's name is dishonest, and it can seriously damage that person's trust in you and the organization's credibility with the media.

A good practice is to save your organization's boilerplate paragraph, contact information format, and preferred tone as a short, reusable instruction document you use every time you draft a release, so you are not retyping the same background details, or risking a small AI-introduced error in them, release after release.

A Worked Example: A Sample Press Release Lead Paragraph

Here is one realistic example of a lead paragraph, written for a fictional nonprofit, showing how the five W's fit into two sentences.

Notice how compactly the five W's appear. Who: the River City Literacy Project. What: opening a free adult reading center. When: this October. Where: Elm Street, in River City, Ohio. Why: to give adult learners direct access to free one-on-one tutoring. A journalist skimming only this one paragraph already has everything needed to judge whether the story fits their own audience, which is exactly the goal of a well-written lead paragraph.

Writing a Media Pitch Email

A press release announces news broadly, but it rarely reaches a journalist's inbox on its own. A media pitch is a short email sent directly to one specific journalist or blogger, explaining why a particular story matters to that person's particular audience, right now. Writing an effective pitch draws on the same professional email habits used elsewhere in your work: a clear, honest subject line, a respectful and direct tone, and a message a busy reader can act on quickly.

A strong pitch shares four qualities. First, it is short, ideally no more than a few brief paragraphs, since a journalist may receive dozens or hundreds of pitches in a single day and will not read a long one. Second, it is specific, naming the exact story you are offering rather than describing your organization in general. Third, it is timely, explaining clearly why this story matters right now, whether that is an upcoming event, a new milestone, or a connection to something already in the news. Fourth, and most important, it is written for that journalist's particular audience, explaining why their specific readers or listeners will care, not why the story matters to your own organization.

A pitch also works far better when it is personalized rather than sent identically to a long list of media contacts. Mentioning a journalist's own recent, relevant coverage shows you have actually read their work and are not simply mass-mailing a form letter. This is the same principle behind tailoring a resume and cover letter to one specific job rather than sending an identical version everywhere: a message written for one particular reader is far more persuasive, and far more likely to be read at all, than the same message sent unchanged to hundreds of people.

A Worked Example: A Media Pitch Email Opening

Here is a short, realistic pitch email opening, addressed to a fictional local reporter who has covered adult education before.

Notice how the opening line connects directly to a specific piece of the journalist's own past work, rather than opening with a generic greeting, and how the whole message stays short enough to read in under a minute.

The Basics of Crisis Communication

Crisis communication is how an organization responds quickly, honestly, and clearly when something goes wrong, whether that is a safety problem, a public complaint, an error, or any other event that could damage trust if it is handled poorly. Two mistakes cause the most damage in a crisis, and both are worth naming clearly. The first is silence: saying nothing at all, for too long, while a problem is unfolding publicly. Silence rarely reads as neutral. It usually reads as guilt, indifference, or disorganization, even when none of those are true. The second mistake is over-promising: making a confident guarantee about an outcome that cannot actually be guaranteed, just to sound reassuring in the moment. An over-promise that later turns out to be wrong damages trust far more than an honest, careful first statement would have.

A sound first crisis statement usually does three things. It acknowledges the situation honestly, without minimizing it or hiding behind vague language. It states clearly what is actually known right now, and just as clearly what is not yet known, rather than guessing to fill the gap. And it explains what concrete steps are being taken next, along with a clear promise of when more information will follow. A first statement does not need to answer every possible question immediately. It needs to be honest, calm, and quick.

AI can be genuinely useful here, precisely because speed matters in a crisis. An AI tool can draft a strong first-response statement in the correct tone and structure within moments, which is valuable when every minute of silence works against you. But this is exactly the situation where human review matters the absolute most, not the least. A crisis statement carries real reputational, and sometimes legal, weight, and the pressure to publish quickly makes it easier to miss an error. Every AI-drafted crisis response must be read, fact-checked, and personally approved by a responsible human before a single word of it goes out publicly. Using AI to draft quickly and a human to approve carefully, together, is the safest way to move fast in a crisis without moving recklessly.

Public Relations for Nonprofits and Advocacy Groups

Nonprofit and advocacy-group public relations shares the same structure and drafting habits already covered in this lesson, but it carries a few considerations worth naming on their own. A nonprofit or advocacy group is not selling a product. It is building public understanding of, and support for, a mission, so its public relations work is, at its core, mission-driven storytelling: real stories about real people, told honestly, that help the public understand why the cause matters.

Telling that story honestly means resisting the temptation to exaggerate a need or a result just to sound more dramatic or urgent, the same accuracy standard covered earlier in this lesson, applied to an organization's whole message, not just its individual facts. It also means telling that story with real respect for the people it describes. A story about someone the organization has helped should be told with that person's knowledge and, wherever possible, their own words and their permission, rather than describing their hardship in a way that strips away their dignity purely to generate sympathy.

This consideration matters directly to this course's own community. An advocacy group representing blind or low-vision people, or any other community, has a particular responsibility to represent that community accurately and respectfully in its own public relations materials: avoiding stereotypes, using language members of that community actually use to describe themselves, and, whenever possible, having an actual community member review material that describes that community before it goes out. This is simply an application of the honesty and respect this entire course has emphasized throughout, applied to how an organization talks about the very people it exists to serve.

A Practical Checklist for Reviewing Any AI-Drafted PR Material

Before any AI-drafted press release, pitch email, or crisis statement goes out under an organization's name, it deserves one final, deliberate review against four questions.

Is it fact-checked? Every name, date, number, and quote should be checked, one at a time, against a real, verified source, never simply trusted because the writing sounds confident.

Is it on-message? The material should support the organization's real goals and its honest mission, without accidentally saying something that undercuts the organization's own credibility or contradicts something it has said elsewhere.

Is the tone appropriate for the situation? A celebratory tone fits a program launch. A sober, careful, and calm tone fits a crisis statement. Using the wrong tone for the situation, even with perfectly accurate facts, can do real damage on its own.

Is it accessible, if it will be published online? Any document destined for online publication should be checked for accessible structure, including proper headings, plain formatting, and a description for any image, before it goes live. A press release published as an inaccessible webpage or an image-only graphic locks out exactly the kind of reader this course has been built to empower.

Why Public Relations Rewards This Kind of Discipline

Public relations depends on especially strict factual discipline, more than many other marketing and communication fields, since its entire value rests on earning independent trust rather than paying for space. That makes it a natural extension of the clear, honest, well-verified writing skills this course has built throughout: drafting clearly with AI, verifying every fact, and writing a message aimed at exactly the right specific reader. This lesson simply gave those same skills a new professional name, public relations, and a new, more public stage to work on.

Key terms from this week

Use this list to review the vocabulary introduced in this lesson before you start the exercises and the test.

Public relations (PR)

The practice of managing how an organization, a person, or a cause is seen and understood by the public, mainly by earning coverage from independent journalists and other trusted messengers rather than paying for placement.

Press release

A short, factual written announcement sent to journalists and other media contacts, following a standard structure of headline, dateline, lead paragraph, supporting quotes, boilerplate, and contact information.

Dateline

The line at the start of a press release's lead paragraph stating the city, and often the state, and the date the release is issued from.

Boilerplate

A short, standard "about" paragraph describing an organization, reused largely unchanged from one press release to the next.

Media pitch

A short, personalized email sent to one journalist or blogger explaining why a specific story matters to their particular audience right now.

Crisis communication

How an organization responds quickly, honestly, and clearly when something goes wrong, avoiding both silence and over-promising.

Keyboard-only exercises

These exercises use only your keyboard. Screen reader commands are described in general terms below; substitute your own screen reader's equivalent command where needed.

Exercise 1: Draft and fact-check a press release lead paragraph

1. Open Notepad, VS Code, or another plain text editor, and create a new plain text file.
2. Choose one real or fictional organization or cause you care about. Type a short bulleted list of five facts about a piece of news from that organization: who, what, when, where, and why it matters. Read back what you typed using Say All, or your screen reader's continuous reading command. Check your own screen reader's documentation for the exact keystroke if you are not sure.
3. Open an AI chatbot such as Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini. Paste or read your fact list to the AI tool and ask it to draft only a headline and a lead paragraph, using this week's five-W's structure, based only on the facts you provided.
4. Read the AI's draft in full using Say All, or your screen reader's continuous reading command. Compare every single detail in the draft against your original fact list, one item at a time, checking for anything the AI added that was not in your list.
5. If you find any fact the AI added or changed, correct it directly in the draft, or ask the AI to redraft using only your verified facts. Save the corrected draft in your working files folder.

Exercise 2: Write a media pitch email

1. Open your email application, or a plain text file if you prefer to draft offline first.
2. Using Tab and Shift plus Tab, move through the compose window's fields until your screen reader announces the subject field. Check your own screen reader's documentation if the field names it announces are unfamiliar. Type a short, specific subject line describing your news in a few words.
3. In the body of the message, using the pitch qualities from this week's lesson, write three to five short sentences: one line connecting to something specific about the recipient, one or two sentences describing the news, and one sentence explaining why it matters to that reader's particular audience right now.
4. Read the full draft back using Say All, or your screen reader's continuous reading command, and check that the message stays under about six sentences total. Check your own screen reader's documentation for the exact keystroke if you are not sure.
5. Save the draft, or leave it unsent in your drafts folder, rather than sending it to a real journalist unless you have their permission to practice with them.

Exercise 3: Draft and review a crisis first response

1. Open an AI chatbot and describe a simple, low-stakes fictional problem for a fictional organization, such as a scheduled community event being delayed by bad weather.
2. Ask the AI tool to draft a short first crisis response statement, following this week's three-part structure: acknowledging the situation, stating what is and is not yet known, and explaining the next step.
3. Read the draft in full using Say All, or your screen reader's continuous reading command, and check it against this week's checklist: is it fact-checked, on-message, appropriately calm in tone, and honest about what is not yet known.
4. If the statement is in HTML or on a webpage, use your screen reader's list of headings or elements (sometimes called an elements list) to check that it has a proper heading structure before treating it as ready to publish. Check your own screen reader's documentation for the exact keystroke.
5. Write one or two sentences noting what you, as the human reviewer, would change or confirm before actually approving this statement for release, and save your notes together with the draft.

Portfolio project: My Press Release

This week's portfolio piece asks you to produce a complete, publication-ready press release and its accompanying media pitch, exactly the pair of documents a public relations professional produces together for a single piece of news.

1. Choose a real or fictional organization or cause: a nonprofit, a small business, or a personal project all work well.
2. Gather and write down every real, verifiable fact you will use: who, what, when, where, why, one supporting quote, and your boilerplate "about" paragraph.
3. Draft a complete press release with AI following the standard structure: headline, dateline, lead paragraph, one or two supporting quotes, boilerplate, and contact information.
4. Verify every single fact in the finished press release against your original fact list, checking names, dates, numbers, and quotes one at a time using Say All, or your screen reader's continuous reading command.
5. Write a short media pitch email, aimed at one specific type of journalist or publication, to accompany the press release, following this week's four pitch qualities: short, specific, timely, and audience-focused.
6. Save both documents together in your portfolio folder, named clearly, such as my-press-release and my-media-pitch.

Before you consider this project finished, check it against this completion checklist:

• I chose one real or fictional organization or cause.
• I wrote down every fact I planned to use before asking AI to draft anything.
• My press release includes a headline, a dateline, a lead paragraph answering the five W's, at least one supporting quote, a boilerplate paragraph, and contact information.
• I checked every fact, name, date, number, and quote in the finished release against my original list.
• I wrote a short, specific media pitch email aimed at one particular type of journalist or publication.
• I saved both documents in my portfolio folder.

Weekly test

Answer key

Each answer below includes a one-sentence explanation drawn from this week's lesson.