Nobody teaches this form. A push notification is written in seconds, read in about one, and it is the only line of journalism most readers will see from that newsroom all day. Yet across half a million of them, clear house styles emerge: how long, whether the line gets a title, whether it shouts. Here are the norms, measured, for the person who writes these for a living.
The anatomy of a push
A notification has two text slots, a title and a body, and newsrooms disagree about what they are for. Across 537,376 pushes:
And the title slot is smaller than it looks. Plenty of apps that always fill it use it as a badge, not a headline: the section name, the brand, or one word meaning "breaking". Sweden is the extreme case. The median Aftonbladet title is seven characters, which is roughly the length of "JUST NU", and the whole story lives in the body. The per-app habits are on the source pages, where each app's title and body lengths sit next to its country's median.
How long a push is
The median push body is 85 characters. Half of everything newsrooms send falls between 64 and 109 characters, which is one sentence with one clause of context. The full shape:
Share of pushes by body length in characters, 530,701 pushes with a body. The two highlighted buckets hold the median.
The tail past 200 characters barely exists, and for good reason: that is where lock screens start truncating mid-word. National styles sit inside the curve. Italian apps write the longest pushes in the dataset at 120 characters on average, patient and almost literary. Danish and Norwegian apps write the shortest at 59 and 64, a bare subject and verb, because the click is the product. If you write pushes, the practical rule the data suggests: one idea, under 110 characters, front-loaded, since anything after the first line is negotiable on small screens.
The missing titles
12.6% of pushes have no title at all. That is not sloppiness; it is a choice about the lock screen. A titleless push renders as app name plus one clean line of text, which reads faster than a two-deck headline. The newsrooms that skip titles are disproportionately the ones that push most, which suggests the high-frequency desks have tested this and stopped spending words on a slot readers skim past. The reverse choice, title only with no body, is a rounding error at 1.2%.
Breaking, questions, shouting
The most surprising norm in the dataset: only 5.2% of pushes carry an explicit "breaking" marker in any language, counting "JUST NU", "Eilmeldung", "última hora" and their cousins. Newsrooms have collectively concluded that the buzz in the pocket already says urgent, and the words should spend themselves on the story. The question-mark push, at 6.4%, is its own genre: it is how feature desks borrow a breaking-news channel. And the exclamation mark, 2.5% overall, lives almost entirely in sport, where "3-2!" is a complete sentence.
Emoji is a French habit
Overall, 4.7% of pushes contain an emoji, which sounds like a rounding error until you split it by country. 26.9% of French pushes carry one, and 20.5% of Belgian ones; the red circle 🔴 marking a live story is practically standard French typography now. Meanwhile Sweden, the UK and Finland sit at effectively zero. Emoji in a news push is not a maturity stage newsrooms grow into or out of. It is a national register, as settled as headline case.
Share of each country's pushes containing an emoji, top ten countries. Per-app emoji rates are on the source pages.
Method
Measured on 537,376 push notifications from 336 news apps, 1 Aug 2025 to 31 Jul 2026, as they landed on AO.news's capture phones; front-page headline robots are excluded. Lengths count characters of the original text before translation. The "breaking" figure matches an explicit marker vocabulary across the dataset's 31 languages, so understatement is possible where a language has markers we missed. Emoji detection covers the standard pictograph ranges. The companion piece on volume is how many pushes a news app sends per day, and the full dataset is in a year of push notifications.