“Journalists do use wires, but it seems that they are used more for checking facts than picking up new stories. We believe that the best way to target a journalist is to follow them, understand what they write about, pitch a story to them exclusively, and provide them with good content.”

Source: https://vitispr.com

The general consensus of journalists from the study was that wires offer the ability to provide additional information, however, newswires need to find a way to help cut through the endless amount of less valuable press releases.

Relevance is a major issue—many journalists do not want to wade through newswires that are filled with irrelevant or investor-type releases

On the other hand, Jas noted that focused newswire services are clearly valuable for some sectors, such as automotive.

Nonetheless, the study showed that 37% of journalists use a newswire every day, and 30% use one occasionally. If you add up those numbers, it turns out that 2/3 of journalists use a newswire—a considerable amount.

Manual press release services

On the other hand there are PR outreach services like Prowly^[14], Prezly^[15] and Muck Rack^[16].

PR outreach^[17] involves reaching out to relevant journalists and other media contacts in order to pitch them your story or press release.

The benefit of such tools is that they greatly simplify the process of doing manually, which considerably takes up a lot more time and effort.

Finding relevant contacts for your news—whether it’s by beat or location—is a breeze with the included media database.

Managing your contacts is made easy with a CRM for PR, where you can add notes or tags and use filters.

As for the actual distribution, it’s a big improvement versus doing it manually by yourself. Personalization features, high deliverability and effective follow ups let you get your press release out to many relevant journalists at once.

The downside compared to newswires, is that the process can still take a bit longer and their reach is smaller (but more targeted).