The Phone Number Gap
The finding
The share of press releases containing a phone number ranges from 34.6% to 73.9% depending on the service. On the largest service in the study, roughly two in three releases give a reporter no phone route at all — and it is the service with the lowest rate of any we measured.
This matters at exactly one moment, and it is the moment that decides coverage: a reporter filing within the hour does not send an email and wait.
Contact infrastructure by service
| Service | Has a phone number | Has a contact email |
|---|---|---|
| Service F | 73.9% | 96.7% |
| Service C | 65.6% | 44.4% |
| Service D | 55.2% | 70.8% |
| Service B | 54.7% | 99.9% |
| Service E | 54.3% | 75.1% |
| Service A | 34.6% | 50.2% |
The two columns do not track each other. Service C has the second-highest phone coverage and the lowest email coverage; Service B is close to universal on email and mid-table on phone. Whatever drives one does not drive the other.
Why deadline changes everything
Outside deadline, email is fine. Inside it, the calculus inverts. A reporter with an hour to file needs a yes or no now, and an unanswered email is a no. The releases that get quoted tend to name a person and give a number that reaches them the same day.
“Media Relations” with a general inbox is a way of saying you are not expecting the call — which is usually accurate, and is exactly the problem.
What a usable contact block looks like
Most contact blocks fail in one of three predictable ways, and all three are visible at a glance.
The first is the anonymous block: a department name and a shared inbox, with no individual named. It answers the form field without answering the reporter's question, which is who picks up.
The second is the agency-only block, listing the PR firm but nobody at the company. This works when the agency genuinely has authority to comment and fails badly when it becomes a relay, adding a day to every question at exactly the moment a day is not available.
The third is the stale block, naming somebody who left. Nothing bounces, because the address usually still accepts mail, and nobody discovers the problem until an opportunity has already passed.
A working block names one person, gives their direct line and their direct address, states their role, and includes a second name for when the first is unreachable. It takes four lines and it is the highest-leverage part of the document.
What to do about it
- Give a direct number, not a switchboard.
- Name the person who will answer it and make sure they know they are on it.
- Do not rely on the template — a contact heading with nothing under it is worse than none.
- Include international format if your audience is not domestic.
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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