Will PRFilter change journalists’ habits?

Posted by Will Cooper
on 17th February 2011
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Picture 7This week online press release distribution service RealWire announced an update to PRFilter, which will turn the service into what the company is pitching as the first press release search engine.

The platform allows journalists, bloggers and other PRs to search its index of thousands of releases to find those specific, or related to, the subject matter they’re writing about.

You can filter by release time, and for those that are logged in it tailors results based on what each user’s topics of interest are.

All very useful, but are journalists really going to use it?

Journalists, and especially specialist reporters, are constantly bombarded by press releases, with PR-related emails per day sometimes reaching the hundreds.

Unless you’re a very organised journalist – often a contradictory term – it’s easy to lose track of what you’ve been sent.

So a specialist search engine for press releases initially seems useful. Until you remember one already exists: Google.

It’s really not hard to find releases on existing search engines – a couple of minutes searching is probably the maximum you’d need, especially for major brands.

Furthermore, any brand that’s able to pump out press releases via an email shot will undoubtedly also upload the release to their site. So a reporter, if they’re unsuccessful using Google, Bing or Yahoo, would nine times out ten go to the brand next.

Having played with PRFilter for a bit, it does deliver, but not necessarily to the extent that it’s going to change journalist habits in the long term.

Will is deputy and news editor at Reputation Online’s sister title, new media age.

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Recent comments

  • At the very least, to have a site which is a centralised database of releases is a good thing. I agree that it may not be too different to many that already exist and it's simply a piece of positioning - but it's a clever one and I'm certainly going to have a play with it asa result.

    Thanks Will/Adam

  • Hi Will

    Thanks for highlighting the new features. Your points about Google and other forms of search are all well made. I agree you should be able to find a press release from a major brand through other means in a few minutes.

    However leaving aside whether “a couple of minutes” is a couple of minutes longer than many people would want something to take these days (particularly where news is concerned) what isn’t as easy is around topics rather than brands. How would Google have helped you this week at Mobile World Congress to find the most relevant press releases in the last few hours relating to Android for example? You could trawl through Google News but that will take a *lot* more than a couple of minutes. Never mind the fact that it will already have been written about by the time items appear in results.

    From a journalist perspective we still think the primary benefit from PRFilter is the ability to filter releases for you personally as you mention. However we built the public search function because the feedback we received was that some people wanted to be able to gain an understanding of how the service worked and whether it delivers before they used it on a (free) registered basis. In a world of registration overload this seems quite reasonable. Also so that PRs could use the service for research purposes as well.

    When inboxes are filled with hundreds of releases we think there is a significant need for innovation in the area of relevance in PR and to date I’m afraid (with one or two exceptions) I haven't seen a huge amount of it from elsewhere. Will PRFilter change journalist’s habits? I don’t know. But if, when you tried, it delivered, then surely that’s a start? I mean how often can a journalist say that about press release services? :-)

    So can I interest you in a (free) personal account?

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