The 851-Word Problem: Press Releases Run Twice as Long as Journalists Read, Study Finds

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The average press release now runs 851 words, roughly double the 400-500 words working journalists say they will read, PR Gun analysis of 138,901 releases shows.
UNITED STATES - August 25, 2026 - The average press release runs 851 words, according to a new analysis of 138,901 releases distributed between 2021 and 2026, roughly twice the 400 to 500 words working journalists commonly cite as their reading limit.

The study, by press release distribution service PR Gun, found a median length of 701 words, meaning the average is not skewed by a handful of extreme outliers: long releases are the norm, not the exception.

Length hurts twice. Journalists skim, so the newsworthy fact buried in paragraph six is functionally invisible. And syndication surfaces truncate, so the tail of a long release frequently never renders at all.

The releases that performed best in the corpus followed a consistent shape: the news in the first sentence, one supporting quote, one paragraph of context, a boilerplate, and a contact block, arriving well under 500 words. That structure is documented step by step in PR Gun's how to write a press release [https://prgun.com/article/72/how-to-write-a-press-release] guide.

Writers who cannot get a draft under length can compare professional options in the best press release writing services [https://prgun.com/article/90/best-press-release-writing-services] review. Formatting benchmarks across the full corpus appear in the pricing and formatting guide [https://prgun.com/article/71/press-release-distribution-pricing-guide-2026].

The distribution tells its own story. With a median of 701 words against an average of 851, long releases are not the work of a few outliers; more than half the corpus exceeds any working journalist's stated reading budget. The overrun is structural: multiple executive quotes that repeat one another, product specifications that belong on a website, and background sections that restate the boilerplate. Each addition feels justified in isolation; together they bury the news.

Length also interacts badly with every other finding in the study. A long release with a truncated headline, no image, and no phone number requires a journalist to read 850 words, independently verify the issuer, and initiate an email thread just to write a two-paragraph item - an investment few stories earn. The releases that performed best inverted the ratio: they spent their length budget on the first hundred words and trusted the linked materials to carry the detail, treating the release as the invitation to the story rather than the story itself.

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 [https://prgun.com/] 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 [https://prgun.com/pricing]. The company publishes ongoing research on press release effectiveness drawn from its database of more than 140,000 distributed releases.
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