The Net's growth appears to be fueling consolidation in the industry. PR Newswire, which claims to serve two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, says its Web site serves up 5 million pageviews a month. The two services together move nearly 2,000 press releases each day. Both the giants and the newcomers in the business use the same model. They build a database of journalists and charge companies for delivering press releases to reporters and editors.
News organizations get the service for free.
Reporters select in advance which categories they want to view and, upon entering the site, see that day's releases arranged by category and hour of delivery. And it can be a lucrative business. He says he's twice turned down offers to sell the business - or at least his list of 10,000 media contacts. Some analysts have feared the Internet would produce widespread, and largely unprecedented, opportunities for fraud disguised as public relations. Internet News Bureau, another online news distributor, monitors its list to ensure registrants aren't salespeople posing as journalists.