Selective

There's no point in flooding journalists with uninteresting press releases. Only contact the media if you have real news! "Announcements that are not newsworthy should not be made: they clog up communication channels and can even kill the chances of future releases by flagging up to journalists that a press officer or a company has no news judgement", says Jenny Luesby, who used to be a journalist for The Financial Times and is now a PR consultant.

Remember that what is important to you may well be futile for the rest of the world.

Press releases are part of PR, not marketing. Leave purely commercial information for advertising.

Like for all business writing, keep it short: one page, or even one screen, should be enough. Journalists are such busy people that they won't read the rest anyway. (Worse, if your press release is too long, they may not even start reading.)

News hook

You can make your press release more newsworthy by linking it to the latest news or demonstrating how it is relevant to what people are preoccupied with.

The following headline of a press release focuses on the product's feature and it's not clear to the journalist why it would be in any way newsworthy:

One news hook which journalists could be interested in would be to point out the product's ecological benefits or its cost-saving potential, like in:

A good alternative for the local media would be to tap into a local story: see if a store in your neighbourhood would host or sponsor a cook-off featuring the new stove.