Can a Journalist Actually Reach You?
The finding
Across 129,742 press releases, the share including a contact email address ranged from 44.4% to 99.9% depending on which distribution service carried them, and the share including a phone number ranged from 34.6% to 73.9%. On the largest service in the study, two releases in three give a reporter no phone route at all.
That spread is not about how well the release was written. It tracks the service it was filed through, which means it is largely a property of the submission template and the house style around it rather than the sender's intent.
Why a missing contact costs coverage
A reporter who wants to use your announcement usually needs something the release does not contain: a figure clarified, a claim checked, an interview arranged, an image at print resolution. If there is no way to ask, the realistic options are to run it unverified or move on.
Most move on. Verification is not optional for a working newsroom, and chasing an unreachable source is a poor use of a deadline. The release still appears in the archive and still counts toward the pickup number on your report, but the conversation that turns a release into an article never starts.
Nothing errors. Nothing bounces. The announcement simply fails to convert, and the reason never appears in any report the sender receives.
The numbers
| Service | Releases analysed | Contact email | Phone number |
|---|---|---|---|
| Service C | 43,802 | 44.4% | 65.6% |
| Service A | 50,802 | 50.2% | 34.6% |
| Service D | 9,793 | 70.8% | 55.2% |
| Service E | 19,053 | 75.1% | 54.3% |
| Service F | 2,510 | 96.7% | 73.9% |
| Service B | 3,361 | 99.9% | 54.7% |
The two columns do not move together. Service A carries an email address about half the time but a phone number least often of any service. Service C is the reverse: the weakest on email and the second strongest on phone.
One measurement note matters here. Some services display contact addresses in a masked form on their own pages rather than in plain text. A masked address is still a contact address the sender supplied, so it is counted as present throughout. Ignoring that distinction understates the lowest service by more than twenty points and produces a far more dramatic finding than the data supports.
What to do about it
- Name a person, not a department. A shared inbox signals nobody is expecting the call.
- Put the contact block in the body text, not only in the submission form. Form fields are often stripped or shown only on the originating page.
- Include a direct phone number. A reporter filing within the hour will call rather than email and wait.
- Check the published version. Open your last release where it actually appeared and see whether the contact details survived, and in what form.
Methodology
These findings come from an analysis of 134,126 press releases studied between 7 May and 15 August 2026 across ten distribution services. Body text was available for 129,742 of them, and only services carrying more than 2,000 releases are reported.
Percentages are calculated within each service rather than across the whole corpus, so they are unaffected by how many releases each service contributed. Services are reported anonymously and the same letter refers to the same service throughout; the spread between them is the finding, not the ranking.
Some services display contact details in a masked form rather than plain text; masked details are counted as present. A publication date is not recorded for every release, so analyses that depend on dates or times state their own smaller sample size. Figures last verified 15 August 2026. You are welcome to cite these findings with attribution to PR Gun.
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