Considered the gold standard in newswire distribution, but be careful about being held to their personal editorial preferences
July 30, 2021

Considered the gold standard in newswire distribution, but be careful about being held to their personal editorial preferences

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with PR Newswire

Our agency uses PR Newswire to distribute news for our clients over the wire. It is exclusively used by our PR division as a way to memorialize news and announcements, have the news populate Google and other news alerts, and tie the news to the ticker symbols for our publicly traded clients. It ensures that there is an official, searchable and findable record of news that's been announced for and about the company and its stakeholders.
  • Making news searchable and findable, populating automated news alerts for those who follow certain companies and/or industries.
  • Ensuring that news is issued in a way that satisfies legal and regulatory requirements for publicly traded companies.
  • Ensuring that all content distributed through the platform is editorially sound and free of grammatical errors.
  • Lately, we noticed that PR Newswire has been holding up distributions for more than one client due to its in-house editors taking personal issue with the content of the news being shared. That's a critically bad issue.
  • The automated reports are very in-depth, but they lack context regarding what the numbers really mean. I would love to see greater analysis, not just numbers reporting.
  • Customer support (non-editorial) needs a bit of an overhaul. Since being acquired by Cision, the customer service has gone downhill.
  • The ability to ensure that news is distributed in a timely and effective way.
  • Automated reporting that's easy to share with clients.
  • High-quality editorial review and corrections when needed.
  • Our agency needs a reliable solution for distribution of press releases. PR Newswire has served that need.
  • While newswires are generally a necessary evil, the agency doesn't directly incur costs. There's no real impact on ROI outside of being able to deliver this service for clients.
  • There's been a positive impact based on the ability to report impressive results, but we as an agency usually temper the numbers by explaining what they truly mean.
PR Newswire is considered one of the two gold standard newswire services because of its wide reach and high quality reporting. Pricing is almost identical to its biggest competitor, Business Wire, so it winds up being a matter of preference and ease more than anything. We actually made the decision to move our business away from PR Newswire due to their growing desire to have editorial oversight over the news we're distributing on behalf of clients.

Do you think PR Newswire delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with PR Newswire's feature set?

Yes

Did PR Newswire live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of PR Newswire go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy PR Newswire again?

No

PR Newswire is a terrific solution for ensuring that news is distributed in a way that is findable and searchable. It also automatically ties the news to ticker symbols. It's not a useful or meaningful solution for actually securing news coverage. It still requires picking up the phone and pitching media.