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 guide, with professional drafting compared in the best press release writing services review and the full corpus benchmarks in the research library.
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 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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