Joseph Miller, product manager for EON: Enhanced Online News, Business Wire San Antonio, recently evaluated “hit” news releases and what they have in common. His criteria for hit releases were getting the most reads or page views on EON.
According to Miller, the top traits of successful news releases are:
1. 87% included at least one link in one form or another in the body of the release
2. 73% incorporated some special formatting within the body of the release, whether it be bold, italics, underlining or an embedded image
3. 68% had a sub-headline
4. 58% included the company name in the release headline
5. 35% included a photo or video, with the vast majority of those including a photo only
6. 23% encouraged social sharing or engagement within the body of the release, typically Facebook or Twitter
7. 5% had special characters (e.g. registration trademark or trademark) in the headline, which may indicate special characters are not particularly useful.
Nearly 60% of the best releases had more than 500 words, and 10 am and 12 pm ET were tied for the most frequent distribution times. For more information about his findings, visit:
http://blog.businesswire.com/2010/05/06/seven-traits-of-highly-effective-press-releases/
Don Beehler provides public relations consulting services to small- and medium-sized advertising agencies and businesses.
The Art of Telling Your Story 
A great post, Don, and one stat to add, is that releases that include video on average, earned about 30 seconds more of their readers time. Jiyan’s research can be found here: http://bit.ly/cT6B1X
Thanks for this helpful additional information, Frank.