Do Press Releases Still Get Read, and by Whom?

Are press releases actually used?

Yes, and by more journalists than the format's reputation suggests. Cision's 2026 survey of 1,899 journalists across North America, EMEA and APAC found 66% relying on PR-provided content for story ideas — the leading source of leads in the study.

That figure describes a starting point rather than a finished article. A release supplying the existence of a story is doing something different from a release being reproduced, and this survey measures the first. Nothing in it establishes how often released material appears in published copy, and this report does not claim it does.

The condition driving the reliance is stated in the same survey. 49% of journalists name shrinking budgets, staff cuts and increased workload as their biggest obstacle. A newsroom with fewer reporters covering the same territory has a structural appetite for material that arrives pre-assembled, and that appetite is what a press release is answering.

The distinction between a lead and a source is worth holding onto, because the same survey result gets quoted in both senses. A journalist who learns from a release that a company has raised money, launched a product or published research has taken a lead from it; they will then usually verify the claim, seek comment, and write something the release did not contain. That is the channel working as intended, and it is a long way from the fear that newsrooms reprint supplied copy.

Where reproduction does happen, it tends to be in the parts of publishing least like journalism: syndicated wire feeds, aggregated market pages, and the trade sections of outlets running skeleton staff. Those pages are indexed and permanent, which has value, but a buyer should be clear that appearing there is a distribution outcome rather than an editorial endorsement.

How much competition is there?

Most journalists receive 50 or more pitches a week. Against a publication schedule that might absorb a handful of stories, that is a rejection rate approaching certainty before any judgement about quality is made.

The stated reason for rejection is overwhelmingly singular: 86% say they will reject a pitch because it lacks relevance to their audience or beat. Not because it is badly written, not because the story is weak, but because it was sent to the wrong person.

This is the same finding Muck Rack's separate survey produces from a different sample, where 70% of journalists put alignment with their existing coverage above every other criterion. Two vendor studies, different populations, same binding constraint.

What does this imply about how releases should be sent?

It implies that distribution breadth is working against the thing it is bought for. A release sent to a thousand journalists arrives as irrelevant to almost all of them, and irrelevance is the stated rejection reason for 86% of the recipients.

The wire services that sell broad distribution are selling reach into inboxes, which is a real service with a real function — syndication, disclosure obligations, a permanent indexed record. What they are not selling, and generally do not claim to sell, is the editorial attention that converts a release into coverage.

The implication for a sender is that the list matters more than the document. Ten recipients who cover the precise subject are a better proposition than a thousand who do not, and that is a research task rather than a distribution purchase.

There is a second implication about timing that the volume figure makes concrete. If a journalist receives fifty or more approaches a week, the material competing with yours is not the other stories in their inbox that morning; it is the whole week's accumulation, most of it unread. Sending at a moment when the subject is already live in their coverage does more than any improvement to the document, because relevance is assessed against what they are working on rather than against the merits in the abstract.

The same arithmetic explains why follow-up is usually wasted effort. A second message to a recipient who rejected the first on relevance grounds does not change the ground of the rejection; it adds to the fifty. The productive version of persistence is not repetition but re-targeting, which means going back to the list rather than back to the inbox.

How much should these figures be trusted?

Both surveys are vendor research. Cision sells PR software, media databases and wire distribution; Muck Rack sells a media database and PR platform. Their respondents are reached through those products, which means both samples over-represent journalists who maintain public contact profiles — precisely the journalists who receive the most pitches.

That selection bias points in a predictable direction. A journalist easy to pitch receives more pitches, rejects more of them, and is more conscious of PR material as an input than a colleague who is harder to reach. The 66% reliance figure and the 50-per-week volume are both likely to be upper bounds for the profession as a whole.

Neither company is disinterested in the answer. A finding that journalists rely on PR content supports the case for buying PR software; a finding that relevance decides everything supports the case for buying a better database. That does not make the numbers wrong, and no independent survey of comparable scale was located to check them against, which is itself the significant limitation.

One further limitation applies to both studies and is rarely acknowledged when they are quoted. Journalists who respond to a survey about pitching are self-selecting on interest in the subject, and the questions themselves are framed in the vendor's professional vocabulary — pitches, media kits, PR-provided content. A reporter who thinks of the same material as press-office noise may answer differently, or not at all.

What survives the caveats?

Two things, and they are enough to act on. First, the channel is not dead: a substantial majority of surveyed journalists report using PR-supplied material to find stories, and the newsroom conditions producing that reliance are worsening rather than easing.

Second, the filter is relevance and it is applied before anything else. Both instruments agree on this despite different samples and question wordings, which is the strongest form of evidence available in a field with no independent research.

The uncomfortable corollary for anyone buying distribution is that the two findings pull against each other commercially. Journalists use this material, and they discard it when it is not theirs — so the value is concentrated in a targeting decision that costs nothing and is usually skipped, rather than in the distribution that costs money and is usually purchased.

There is a final asymmetry worth naming. The two things this evidence says matter most — knowing who covers the subject, and having something genuinely relevant to them — are both cheap in money and expensive in attention. The thing that costs money, broad distribution, addresses neither. That is an uncomfortable finding for a category whose pricing is built almost entirely on reach, and it is what two independent vendor surveys, each with a commercial interest in the opposite conclusion, both report.

The channel's survival, then, is not really in doubt; what is in doubt is the theory of value usually sold alongside it. Journalists take leads from supplied material because their newsrooms are under-resourced, and they discard almost all of it because it was aimed at nobody in particular. Both halves of that sentence come from the same surveys, and only one half tends to appear in a distribution vendor's marketing.

Methodology and limitations

Figures are from Cision's Global State of the Media 2026, a survey of 1,899 journalists across North America, EMEA and APAC fielded in January and February 2026, and from Muck Rack's The State of Journalism 2026, which reached 897 journalists in its final analysis between 30 January and 2 March 2026. Four limits apply. First, both studies are produced by companies selling PR software and media databases to the audience that sends pitches, and both recruit respondents through those products; the samples over-represent easily contactable journalists. Second, the surveys measure stated reliance and stated rejection reasons, not observed outcomes: no analysis reviewed here links released material to published coverage. Third, the pitch-volume figure is reported as a threshold, so no average is calculable from it. Fourth, no independent survey of comparable scale was located, so the vendor findings could not be checked against a disinterested instrument.

Conclusion

Press releases are read, by about two thirds of surveyed journalists, under newsroom conditions that make pre-assembled material more useful each year. They are also discarded at scale, and the stated reason is almost always the same one: the material was not relevant to the recipient's beat. Both findings come from companies with a commercial interest in the first half and, awkwardly for them, in the second half too. The practical conclusion is that the scarce resource in this exchange is not distribution but accurate targeting, and that the part of the process which decides the outcome is the part nobody charges for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

1. vendor research Cision, 2026. Global State of the Media 2026. Survey of 1,899 journalists across North America, EMEA and APAC, fielded January to February 2026. Published by a company selling PR software and wire distribution.
2. vendor research Muck Rack, 2026. The State of Journalism 2026, published 19 March 2026. 897 journalists in final analysis, fielded 30 January to 2 March 2026. Published by a media database company.
3. trade press PR Newswire, 2026. “PR Emerges as the Primary Source for Journalists in High-Pressure Newsrooms”, announcing the Cision report.