Here’s why. If you want to distribute a press release by yourself (and get results), you have to go through the whole process of finding media contacts^[9], creating a media list^[10], pitching them^[11], following up, and potentially building media relations with said people. 

As an example, Medstar helped a social campaign land 150 publications and go viral^[12] by using Prowly, a PR outreach tool. Could they have done it by themselves? Maybe. However, it would take hours upon hours of creating a media list and reaching out to journalists manually to get the same kind of results.

So the question is not if you should use press release distribution services, but rather finding the one best suited for your needs.

Newswire press release distribution vs PR outreach overview

Newswires

Newswires like PR Newswire, PRWeb and Ein Newswire are services that distribute your press releases. They work by sending press releases to subscribing news organizations, newspapers and outlets such as Associated Press, Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, the Wall Street Journal and Yahoo! Finance and news sites such as Google news, Bing or Yahoo.

Professionals working in the PR industry have mixed opinions about press release distribution services and their effectiveness. As one user from Reddit said: 

“If a B2B company has a legitimate, solid news story and a press release can be extremely informative, with great quotes from important people, I will use a wire service so I can piggy back my pitching off of it. I can use the link to the press release and indicate that the information was released over the wire.”

Source: https://reddit.com/r/publicrelations

And another user stating that it’s often an obligation to release the information in wire format for listed companies.

Jas from Vitis PR^[13] conducted a study based on 80 journalists from the UK and what they think about newswires. Here’s what one had to say: