One in Four Press Releases Opens With the Same Stock Phrases, and 18.6% Call Something "Innovative"

Image: https://www.globalnewslines.com/uploads/2026/08/1787601039.jpg

PR Gun analysis finds 26.5% of releases open with "proud to," "pleased to," or "excited to announce" constructions, and nearly one in five leans on the word "innovative."
UNITED STATES - August 25, 2026 - A quarter of all press releases open the same way. In a new study of 138,901 releases, 26.5 percent led with a stock construction, "is proud to announce," "is pleased to announce," "is excited to announce," "today announced," or "announces the launch," before the reader learns anything at all.

The analysis, by press release distribution service PR Gun, also measured buzzword load: 18.6 percent of releases describe something as "innovative," with "seamless," "robust," and "world-class" ranking next among the corpus's most-worn adjectives.

The cost of sameness is practical, not aesthetic. Journalists triage hundreds of releases a day; identical openings make identical impressions, and the release that leads with a concrete number or a named fact is the one that reads as news rather than advertising.

The same dataset shows why the opening line matters disproportionately: with average length at 851 words and headlines routinely truncated in search, the first sentence is often the only sentence evaluated. Opening structures that work are documented in PR Gun's how to write a press release [https://prgun.com/article/72/how-to-write-a-press-release] guide, with professional drafting compared in the best press release writing services [https://prgun.com/article/90/best-press-release-writing-services] review and the full corpus benchmarks in the research library [https://prgun.com/article/71/press-release-distribution-pricing-guide-2026].

The clustering is heavier than the headline numbers suggest, because the stock phrases travel together. A release that opens with "is pleased to announce" is disproportionately likely to also describe its product as "innovative," its integration as "seamless," and its market position as "industry-leading" - the phrases arrive as a package, usually from a shared template lineage, and mark the release as template output before a human has read a full sentence.

The study's suggested repair costs nothing: replace the ceremonial opening with the fact the release exists to announce. "Acme raised $12 million" outperforms "Acme is pleased to announce the successful completion of its funding round" on every surface that truncates, and reads as news rather than self-congratulation on every surface that does not. The adjectives follow the same rule - a measured claim with a number in it ("cuts processing time 40 percent") survives editorial skepticism that "innovative" and "world-class" trigger automatically after their ten-thousandth appearance in the corpus.

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.
Media Contact
Company Name: PR Gun
Contact Person: Media Relations
Email: Send Email [http://www.universalpressrelease.com/?pr=one-in-four-press-releases-opens-with-the-same-stock-phrases-and-186-call-something-innovative]
Country: United States
Website: https://prgun.com/

Legal Disclaimer: Information contained on this page is provided by an independent third-party content provider. GetNews makes no warranties or responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you are affiliated with this article or have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article and would like it to be removed, please contact retract@swscontact.com



This release was published on openPR.