Press releases are the Rasputin of tech communications: They simply won’t die. Press releases were essential once but haven’t been useful for a long time.

When I started my career as a public relations intern in the early 2000s, one of the first things I learned was how to write a press release. Any self-respecting company making an announcement was following this well-established process: 

• Write a press release in the third person, as if an outsider visited your office to get the scoop and is filing it to their editor.
• Pay a newswire, like PR Newswire or Business Wire, to publish your news on their website and make it visible to newsrooms.

Every announcement…