Press kit: what journalists actually need from you

A press kit is a page on your own site holding what somebody writing about you needs: facts they can check, images they can publish and a person they can reach. Its purpose is to remove friction at the exact moment a journalist has decided to mention you and has twenty minutes before filing — and most press kits fail by offering enthusiasm where facts were required.

What belongs in a press kit

• A short factual description in two or three lengths, so it can be used as written rather than rewritten.
• Founding date, location, size and ownership — the facts that get checked and are tedious to hunt down.
• Logos in several formats, including a version that works on a dark background.
• Product screenshots or photographs at publication resolution, not web-compressed thumbnails.
• Headshots of the people likely to be quoted, taken recently enough to be recognisable.
• A named press contact with an email that is answered, and a realistic response time.
• Recent announcements with dates, so somebody can see what has happened without searching.

Why the images matter most

An article needs a picture, and the easiest picture to use decides what runs. If your available images are a logo and three web-sized screenshots, the piece gets a stock photo and your product never appears. Supply high-resolution files, state plainly that they may be used in coverage, and include both horizontal and square crops because those are the two shapes publishing systems demand. This is unglamorous and it is the single highest-return element of the whole page.

State the usage permission explicitly — that media may use these assets in coverage without asking. Journalists on a deadline will not write to request permission; they will use something else, and your absence from the article is the result of an unanswered question nobody asked.

What to leave out

1. Marketing language, which gets rewritten or quoted sarcastically.
2. Claims you cannot evidence, since a checkable fact is the point of the page.
3. Gated downloads requiring a form, which defeat the entire purpose.
4. A PDF containing everything, because text cannot be copied reliably and images cannot be extracted quickly.
5. Out-of-date figures, which are worse than no figures — a journalist who finds one stale number stops trusting the rest.

Ettex Web is a reasonable home for the kit as a plain page with the files linked directly, rather than an archive to download. Keeping it current is a small job with a review date, and the people quoted belong in the same record as the announcements, so both get updated at the same moment.