
Press Release Distribution Is Dead. Retrievability Is Everything.
For most of my career, the PR industry measured success one way: distribution. How many newsrooms received your release? How many outlets carried it? How many impressions did it generate? We built entire reports around those numbers, and they looked fantastic in a slide deck. A release that generated "2 million impressions" and "450 media pickups" felt like a win. But if you followed those numbers downstream to revenue, customer acquisition, or business outcomes, the correlation was often weak. Distribution measured exposure. It didn't necessarily measure influence. That model is broken. AI didn't crack it. It shattered it.
David McInnis


























