Flow and Narrative Consistency: When a Story Falls Apart on the Page
Some press releases fail quietly.
They aren’t badly written, they aren’t inaccurate, and they often contain genuinely newsworthy information. And yet, when a journalist reads them, something doesn’t quite hold. The story feels harder to follow than it should. The focus drifts. By the end, the reader isn’t entirely sure what mattered most.
This is usually a problem of flow.
Flow in PR writing is not about elegance or style. It is about cognitive ease. A story with good flow carries the reader forward without friction, allowing them to absorb information in the order that makes most sense. When flow breaks down, journalists are forced to stop, re-read, or mentally reorganise the story themselves. Under pressure, that extra effort often means the story doesn’t progress any further.
Narrative consistency plays a large role here. Every strong press release has an underlying theme, whether it is explicitly stated or not. That theme might be growth, change, problem-solving, or impact. When a release introduces new ideas that don’t clearly connect back to that theme, momentum is lost. The reader may not consciously identify the issue, but they feel it.
This often happens when multiple priorities are competing within a single release. A funding announcement suddenly tries to become a product story. A leadership appointment veers into a market commentary. Individually, the elements may be interesting, but together they dilute the narrative. Instead of reinforcing the core message, they pull the reader in different directions.
Flow is also affected by how paragraphs relate to one another. Each paragraph should feel like a logical next step, not a reset. When information is grouped by importance rather than relevance, stories can feel disjointed even when all the right details are present. Reading a draft aloud is often enough to expose these breaks. If a sentence feels awkward to say, it is usually awkward to read.
From a journalistic perspective, flow matters because it determines how easily a story can be repurposed. A release that moves cleanly from point to point is easier to summarise, quote from, and restructure for publication. When flow is poor, journalists tend to extract isolated facts rather than engage with the story as a whole, which can weaken coverage and distort emphasis.
Looking at coverage after publication often makes these issues clearer. Through media monitoring and narrative analysis, it becomes obvious when stories fragment as they move through press release distribution. Key messages may be picked up inconsistently, or secondary details may eclipse the original theme. PR reporting tools help surface these patterns, showing where narrative cohesion held and where it slipped.
For agencies, maintaining flow and consistency across releases builds familiarity and trust over time. For in-house teams, particularly in corporate, public sector, or nonprofit communications, it supports clarity and accountability. In all cases, narrative consistency reduces the risk of misunderstanding and makes impact easier to measure.
Flow is not something that can be bolted on at the end of the writing process. It emerges from clarity of intent, disciplined structure, and restraint in what is included. When a story knows what it is about, it is much easier to tell.
In the next post, we’ll look at localisation and context, and why a story that works perfectly in one market can fall flat in another if relevance is assumed rather than earned.