When I was a lad.....no honestly! When I was lad on newspapers in "the old days" it was rare to use a press release unless it had come from a major organisation - police, fire, council, utility.
The press releases went on a pile until fillers, or grout as it was sometimes known, were needed to fill the space around the major stories.
Sadly today, and I speak as a PR, newspapers rely on press release fodder to fill the papers. A lot of PROs are ex-journos so the quality of the average press release has gone up in my opinion. But it is a pact with the devil. At the end of the day the PR is there to protect reputation and enhance the standing of their client. With police or local authority they are there to firefight and "communicate". The client is always number one.
We used to have a joke in the newsroom way back that a story was "too good to check"! It was tongue in cheek of course but now stories supplied by PRs on a regular basis drop in to the paper without a thorough check. The releases are taken as 100% reliable. While I am not saying that blatant untruths are peddled it does raise the temptation to exaggerate a tad.
Journos should question everything they receive. The lines are blurring and it is Joe Public who suffers. There's never been a better time to get away with something.
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