Any journalist or blogger I talk to says they receive a lot of press releases every day. I recently got a message from a reporter working at a small local paper who received 80 press releases in one day – of which only two were relevant to the information his paper covers. This didn’t surprise me, because I hear this story over and over again. It did get me thinking though, “I wonder how many press releases are distributed each day?”
I’ve tried to find this information before with no luck. I decided to give it another try, this time using Twitter to issue the question to popular news distribution services PR Newswire, BusinessWire, Marketwire and PRWeb. Within a few hours, PR Newswire and BusinessWire responded with almost identical answers: they both send out about 1,000 releases each day (2,000 total), though special features and busy news times can drive this number even hire. Holiday tie-in news releases for example.
