"For the PR's out there who use death by newswires this is worth a read."

So tweets @LittleScotty aka Ashley Scott, the Northern Tech PR with a love for gaming, pies and gravy - although one wonders whether at the same time - and if so, one hopes that the game she's playing is Wii Fit.

She was referring to the research from Parker, Wayne & Kent that showed that nearly three quarters of PR people (72.1 per cent) use press release wires, but almost one in five of them (18.3 per cent) said that these services “very rarely” or “never” get coverage. Only one third (30.5 per cent) confidently claimed that they gained coverage “all the time” from these services. Unsurprisingly maybe, these respondents were generally very positive about the value of their release appearing on a news aggregator site or on electronic press release distribution services. But is that really "coverage" that can be reported back to clients?

Notfiona from PR blog TheSpinBin says, "When you're so enthusiastically shown clips on websites that boast brand names such as Business Week, Fox News, USA Today... remember, it is almost a dead cert that no reporter on those publications has ever read your story, let alone evaluated it and thought about endorsing you. It's just one of the growing breed of auto pickups: fine for Search Engine Optimisation…but is that the only reason you do PR?"

Well for one in ten PR people who use press release wires, that's primarily the reason they use the services.

So a journalist hasn't looked at the release, never mind edited it, worked with it, and selected it for publishing: so is it "coverage"?

Well according to many of the PRs surveyed in the report – probably not. Our public relations peers suggest three main criteria for “coverage”: appearing in trusted third party media that are channels or opinion-formers to the publics being targeted; an element of editorial input by a journalist; and the inclusion of key messages and company sources.

So are electronic press release wires value for money as ways to get coverage of the sort desired by the industry - and we hope its clients? Or have they been relegated to crude SEO tools? Moreover, can the PR industry claim that they get coverage when an unedited release appears on irrelevant websites that will very rarely be read by a client's target customers except with a very specific search or Google Alert for the name of the company featured in the release?

Take a look at the research - Press Release Wires - A Circulation without a Readership?.