A new survey from Parker, Wayne and Kent PR has unsurprisingly shown that communications professionals place higher value on coverage if journalists edit or re-write a story as opposed to unedited press releases appearing in core or ‘top tier’ media.

More interesting however is that by asking over 550 public relations consultants from a wide variety or agencies and brands which type of coverage is most important to them, it’s been revealed just how little importance is placed on news aggregator sites like Digg, Slashdot and Reddit.

Press releases appearing on an online news aggregator site scored an average of 3.21 on a scale of one to six – with six being the highest. In comparison, the highest score of 5.39 went to press releases that had been used to develop an article in core media but had editorial input.

“The survey indicates that many PR people not only desire their release to be edited by a third party, but they place a much higher value on content that appears in core media, as opposed to online news aggregation and distribution sites. This raises the question of whether paying to submit a press release to a newswire to get coverage in non-core media is an effective use of resources, cash or time,” said the report’s author, Rob Jessel from Parker, Wayne & Kent PR.

According to those surveyed, almost three quarters (72.1 per cent) use press release distribution services or “wires”, but as many as one in ten claim that they only use these services to boost search engine rankings. Again, there’s nothing groundbreaking there. However, the respondents that said that press release wires “always” gained coverage were also more positive about the value of appearing on a news aggregator site. It seems that the tide is turning. Once it was believed that these kind of sites had massive potential to increase the visibility of every story, and had become THE source of news content for journalists everywhere. However, many PRs are catching on to the fact that these sites are more about traffic these days – if you’re lucky.

Is this a fair assumption though? Are aggregation services failing to deliver the massive opportunity they was once promised? Publishing 2.0’s editor in chief, Scott Karp, says that: “Mounting evidence suggests that Digg traffic in particular is less like networking with like-minded individuals at a social event and more like getting attacked by a pack of wild dogs, who leave nothing of value in their wake, other than lessons learned on closing comments and crashed servers.”

It’s well-known that the Digg system can be easily ‘gamed’ to push stories up the league table and appear on the homepage for maximum exposure, but has the value from a PR perspective lost its shine? Steve Rubel has the definitive word on this topic, which pretty much puts the final nail in the coffin. “Om Malik says that spammers are abusing community-edited sites such as Del.icio.us and Reddit. Basically they submit spam links and use bots to increase the votes to their stories. Although most PR professionals are not nearly as nefarious, it occurs to me that there could be some who are tempted to seed news release and media coverage links to high-traffic sites like Digg in an effort to juice up their results.”

He continues by saying that the best advice is not to dig for gold, likening aggregation sites to Bengal Tigers. “They’re beautiful to look at and admire, but they’re very dangerous to touch. If your stories end up landing on these sites, then terrific. Be happy. Include the metrics in your coverage reports. But seeding PR links is trouble waiting to happen, especially as these communities become barraged with spam and the users’ sensitivity meter goes to code red.”