UNITED STATES - August 25, 2026 - More than half of all press releases, 55.5 percent, contain no telephone number anywhere in the document, according to a five-year analysis of 138,901 releases by distribution service PR Gun.
For a reporter working a deadline, the phone is still the fastest way to verify a claim, request a quote, or confirm a spokesperson is real. A release without a callable number turns a five-minute verification into an email thread that may outlive the news cycle, and stories go to the competitor who answered.
The omission is rarely deliberate. Media contact blocks are frequently trimmed by templates or dropped during reformatting, and many companies route all contact through a generic web form that journalists will not use.
PR Gun recommends every release close with a named contact, a direct email, and a phone number that is answered during business hours. Contact-block formatting is covered in the company's guide to writing a press release, and how distribution services present contact information is compared in the best press release distribution services guide. The full formatting dataset appears in PR Gun's research library.
The corpus shows the contact block eroding over time. Older releases in the five-year window carry phone numbers at measurably higher rates than recent ones, tracking the broader shift of business communication into email and web forms. But newsrooms did not make that shift. Broadcast desks in particular still work by phone, on deadlines measured in minutes, and a producer deciding between two versions of the same story at 4 p.m. will run the one whose spokesperson picked up.
The study also found that when numbers do appear, they are frequently unanswerable: main-office switchboards, international numbers with no hours listed, or numbers belonging to an agency that no longer represents the issuer. A callable number is a small operational commitment — someone must actually answer it during business hours — but it is one of the few elements of a press release that directly shortens a journalist's path to running the story, which is why its 55.5 percent absence rate represents so much unclaimed advantage.
Methodology: PR Gun collected and analyzed 143,576 press releases distributed through ten major newswires between September 2021 and August 2026; 138,901 carried full body text and were used for content analysis. Matching is case-insensitive and counts presence per release, not frequency.
About PR Gun
PR Gun is a press release distribution service that places customer news on AP News, Google News, and hundreds of regional and industry outlets, with packages starting at $49. The company publishes ongoing research on press release effectiveness drawn from its database of more than 140,000 distributed releases.
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