The Anatomy of a Press Release: A pre-registered census of 246,777 English-language releases on 1,151 websites

Background. Press releases are among the most-written texts in professional communication and the resource journalists say they find most useful, yet their form has been measured mostly in samples of hundreds to a few thousand from one sector, or in vendor counts of distributor releases.

Methods. We set out to read every English-language release with a stated publication date from July 1, 2026 to October 6, 2026 in a press-release archive — 246,777 releases on 1,151 websites of distributors, companies, national, state and local governments, universities, sports leagues and nonprofits — following each website's robots.txt, and measured 176,492 of them on 877 websites with detection rules registered, with the analysis code, before any page was read, and revised once, in the open, after a first reliability test. The rules were checked against a coder reading the pages, and four hypotheses tested with a cluster bootstrap over websites and a Holm correction.

Results. The press release has split in two. On distributors' websites, 64% of releases end with an About section and 76% open with a dateline; on organizations' own websites, 3% and 17% (4.3% and 11% without the sports websites, whose pages are mostly news stories). Distributors' releases are longer by 155 words at the median (H1 supported), mostly outside the story: the body, from the lead to the About section, is not detectably longer. Executives' quotations carry a word of feeling more often than officials' (11.8% against 4.1%; H4 supported). The dateline (H2) and media-contact (H3) rules fell short of the reliability the registration required, so those two hypotheses are reported, not decided. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE survives on 3.2% of releases, 77% of them on a single website, the U.S. Department of Justice's.

Conclusions. The About section, a convention of the newswire era, belongs to the distributors' copy of a release; the dateline and the media contact point the same way, but their rules could not decide it. The copy an organization publishes on its own website has kept the story and little of the apparatus around it.

This record holds the paper (English, French, Spanish), the per-release data (no page text, quotations or contact details), coder A's codings, the code of every step, and the registered files with their SHA-256 manifest and OpenTimestamps proof. See README.txt.