posted anonymously in chat rooms to bogus information released by legitimate-sounding groups.
PR Newswire insists that it is the Net's credible voice - the company says it has "firm policies" about what's acceptable material to disseminate, especially in the area of stock announcements.
Internet News Bureau, another online news distributor, monitors its list to ensure registrants aren't salespeople posing as journalists. "If I find somebody is using it as a marketing list, then I'll tell them to stop or remove their name," says Renee Menius, editor of the Bend, Ore.-based service.
It's not clear what effect, if any, Web-distributed PR has had on the way journalists produce the news. Journalists who want information know where to find it. And reporters, often flooded with requests for coverage, can ignore a virtual press release just as easily as they can ignore a paper one.
Still, the electronic PR firms insist that their service is valuable. Perhaps more important, they have found out that the audience for PR is no longer simply journalists. The Web has made available for free what a PR Newswire official calls "unfiltered, unedited and unselected" corporate data to anyone with a Web browser.
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