A press release that gets covered states the news in the headline, answers who, what, and when within the first two sentences, and gives a journalist everything they need to write the story without calling you. Most releases do the opposite. A five-year analysis of 138,901 press releases published between September 2021 and August 2026 by distribution service PR Gun found the average headline runs 96 characters, roughly 14 words, while search engines display only about 60 characters before truncating. That means 90.2% of the headlines in the study lost part of their message at the exact moment a reader was deciding whether to click.
This is a guide to the parts of a press release that most often go wrong, built around what the data on real, distributed releases actually shows, not generic advice repeated from one blog to the next.
What should the headline actually do?
State the news, in one sentence, in under 60 characters if you can manage it. PRSA's guidance on press release headline length, citing Harris Interactive research, found that only 19% of readers read an article word by word; 34% skim mostly headlines, and another 25% skim the article itself. A catchy, clear headline was the single biggest factor in convincing a skimmer to keep reading, cited by 54% of respondents in that same poll. If the headline does not carry the news, most of your audience never reaches the sentence that does.
The PR Gun study found the overrun happens in a specific, repeatable way: companies try to make one headline do three jobs at once, naming the company, describing the product, and claiming a superlative, and by the time the actual news appears the display window has already closed. The study also found this is a template problem more than a one-time mistake. Releases from repeat issuers showed the identical pattern release after release, while technology and financial services releases ran the longest, routinely crossing 110 characters. An older analysis of over 11,000 BusinessWire releases, cited in the same PRSA piece, found an even longer average of 120 characters, with 79% of headlines exceeding 65 characters. Long headlines are not a new problem. They are a persistent one.
Put the company name in the subheadline, not the headline, unless the company itself is the news. Lead with the concrete fact a reader would repeat to someone else.
What goes in the first two sentences?
The answer to who, what, when, where, and why, in that rough order of importance, borrowed from the inverted pyramid structure newspapers have used for more than a century. A journalist deciding whether to cover your release usually reads no further than the first paragraph before deciding. If the news is buried in paragraph three, behind two paragraphs of context or mission statement, most readers never get there.
Write the lead as if it were the only two sentences anyone would ever read, because for a meaningful share of your audience, it will be. Save the explanation of why the news matters, the background on the company, and the supporting quote for after the core facts are stated plainly.
Do quotes matter, and who should give one?
Yes, but only when they add a perspective the facts alone cannot carry. A quote that restates the headline in a different sentence structure, such as a founder saying they are "thrilled to announce" something the headline already announced, wastes the one place in the release where a human voice could add context: why this decision was made, what it changes for customers, or what comes next. How to pitch a journalist covers the same principle from the other side of the inbox: editors skip anything that reads like it was written for the company's own satisfaction rather than for the reader's.
One well-chosen quote, attributed to a named person with a real title, does more work than three generic ones. If the release covers a partnership, a funding round, or a product launch, how you announce a partnership and how you announce a funding round both go into the specific facts that belong in that quote and that paragraph for each type of announcement.
What is a boilerplate, and why do a quarter of releases skip it?
A boilerplate is the short, standard paragraph at the end of a release that tells a reader who the company is, independent of whatever news the release is announcing. The same PR Gun study found that 24.9% of the 138,901 releases analyzed, about one in four, had no identifiable boilerplate at all. The gap was concentrated almost entirely among first-time issuers; agencies and repeat senders rarely left it out, which suggests the omission is usually an oversight rather than a deliberate cut.
That matters because a boilerplate is often the only part of the document that answers a basic question: what does this company actually do. A journalist unfamiliar with your business uses it to decide whether the release is relevant to their beat at all. PR Gun's recommendation, drawn from the same analysis, is a three-to-four sentence paragraph, written once and reused identically in every release, covering what the company does, who it serves, its founding year, and its headquarters city, followed by a working media contact name, email, and phone number.
Sources: PR Gun's five-year press release analysis and PRSA's headline-length guidance, both linked in the article.
How long should the body actually be?
Shorter than most companies write it. A separate PR Gun analysis of 56,606 releases distributed in 2026 found the average release body runs 870 words with a median of 724, and the 138,901-release study found a similar average of 851 words with a median of 701. Neither figure is a target to hit. Both describe what companies are actually sending, and in most cases, that length includes padding a journalist will skip past to find the two or three facts that matter.
A release that states the news, gives the supporting facts, includes one real quote, and closes with a boilerplate rarely needs more than 400 to 600 words. If a release is running past 800 words, the excess is usually context that belongs on the company's own website rather than in the document meant to get picked up and rewritten in someone else's 300-word story.
Does the press release itself get the coverage, or does the pitch?
The pitch, almost always. Building a media list of journalists who actually cover your beat and sending a release to the right ten people does more than distributing it unchanged across a few hundred wire syndication partners, which has very little independent SEO or citation value once the exact same text appears on every site that picked it up. A well-written release is the raw material a reporter needs to say yes quickly. It is rarely the reason they say yes in the first place; that reason is almost always the news itself and the relevance of the pitch that carried it. When the news is big enough that you want several outlets covering it the same morning, the timing is controlled by a press embargo, which gives each reporter a head start in exchange for holding the story until a set moment.
The direct answer, for anyone who read this far
Write a headline under 60 characters that states the news, not the company. Put the who, what, and when in the first two sentences. Use one quote that adds a reason, not a restatement. Keep a boilerplate paragraph, written once, naming what the company does, who it serves, and where it is based. Hold the body to 400 to 600 words. Ninety percent of real, distributed releases get the headline wrong, and a quarter skip the boilerplate entirely, so getting these basics right already puts a release ahead of most of what a journalist sees that day.
If you want help writing and pitching a release that is actually built to get covered, request a quotation and we will walk you through how we would approach it.
