How the PR Wires Can Save Themselves

In the PR industry, there is a huge reliance not only on press releases but on the two major wire services that distribute them. They are PR Newswire and BusinessWire - the Coke and Pepsi of the PR biz. Everyone uses one or the other or both.

Every day legions of companies spend about $800 - $1,000 and up (depending on the word count) to put their press releases up on the wire. The services then stream these releases to every newsroom in the world as well as to hundreds of Web sites, such as Yahoo Finance for example. The value in these services in the Internet 1.0 era was less in reaching journalists than it was in touching the consumer directly, which I have covered here. In the Web 2.0 era, they will not be as lucky.

Let's put aside for a moment the future of the press release itself. That's a bigger topic that's been discussed to death. I am talking about RSS here. The RSS revolution is going to totally disintermediate the press release wires, unless they adapt quickly. It's not inconceivable that someone will come along soon and build a free press release wire that's built completely with feeds. This service would scoop up corporate and agency press release feeds, tag the content appropriately by industries/topics and ship the content out as uberfeeds.

To their credit, both PR Newswire and Business Wire have adopted feeds as a delivery channel for press releases. However, I see a day coming fast when their dominance will end. It's not time yet, but within five years as RSS really takes hold these guys are going to be as dead as dinos, unless they start to make bigger moves and fast.

So what's the solution? The wire services can save themselves by helping the PR industry move to RSS feeds. The wire services should be the ones helping us set up dedicated RSS feeds, like Nooked does. They should be the ones creating a Web 2.0 model for press releases (assuming they will still exist). If they stay ahead of the RSS curve and help PR pros take advantage of the tools, they will be in a better position to stay relevant. Offering RSS feeds to journalists is a start, but I fear the wire services don't see how easy it is for someone to replicate their business overnight with RSS. Skate to that puck now.

Comments

[Brian Schwartz]

In won't work, at least with public companies, until the SEC approves RSS as way of fairly reaching investors.

Often, I think, BW and PRN are overused for IR reasons not PR ones.

[Phil Gomes]

Warren Buffet just bought BizWire, so he probably knows something we don't.

[Ed Kohler]

It would be great if the cost of sending press releases would go to free, but noise would be a huge problem. Unfortunately, price is used as a filter today in order to keep businesses from pushing press releases out when their CEO blows his nose.

I don't think it will work without RSS filtering that's better than we have today.

[Dee Rambeau]

Yup...and emails will replace phone calls. And cable television will devalue the movie business.

[jeff]

Not every company that sends out a news release via one of the wires is thinking they'll actually secure coverage from a journalist or blogger (whom, perhaps, they should have already pre-briefed). Many just want to end up in Yahoo! Finance and Google News, where one's marketing sits right beside mainstream news. Until RSS is picked up as easily by the latter, for one, I bet companies will keep paying.

[Dominic Jones]

You left out MarketWire and PrimeZone, which are recognized for SEC disclosure, so should have been mentioned.

Also, the wire services you mention are far ahead of the curve. They're not just doing RSS, but NewsML and XBRL and are world leaders in this regard.

Sorry, you missed the boat.

[Klaus P. Frahm]

When we* added RSS feeds to our pr news portal in 2003, NO ONE out there (in the pr/press industry) knew what RSS was. Today maybe 10% know it and only 5% are using it. But we won't give up and add whatever makes sense to better distribute corporate news on behalf of our clients. Let's face it: it's a lot easier to extend a robust news business modell with Web 2.0 functionality than to start a Web 2.0 news logistic service that nobody would pay for.

* we = news aktuell (market leading pr news agency in Germany)

[Harry Chittenden]

The challenge now is to make press releases search and RSS friendly. Amy Gehren has posted good stuff about that.
YOu can't make reporters use feeds. But you can optimize so that your item appears in releavant feeds and you can write a decent headline to induce the click.