A press release wire is a syndication product. You pay, the copy goes into a pipe, and publisher sites reprint it. That reprint is called pickup. It is not coverage. Coverage is a reporter writing their own story with their own lede. EIN Newswire, PR Newswire, GlobeNewswire and Business Wire all sell the pipe. They do not sell a journalist assignment. If a vendor talks as if they do, they are selling the wrong thing or they are an agency bundling labor on top of a wire.

This comparison is about syndication: what lands, where it lands, what it costs in ranges, and who each wire is actually for. Prices move. Circuits get renamed. Masthead add-ons appear and vanish. Treat every dollar figure that is not Cited’s own retail as a band, not a SKU. Cited’s package prices are ours and are current as of this page.

Pickup is not coverage

Pickup means a feed accepted your text and a publisher’s CMS reprinted it. The headline is yours. The quotes are yours. The URL is on their domain. That is the whole transaction. A report with fifty live links is a pickup report. It is proof of syndication, not proof that anyone with a press pass cared.

Coverage means a human at a desk decided the fact was worth their byline. They called you, or they did not. They rewrote the lede, or they ignored you. You cannot buy that from a wire checkout. You can raise the odds that a reporter sees the copy — PR Newswire and Business Wire still sit in newsroom systems in a way budget wires do not — but “sits in the system” is not “ran the story.” Most paid releases die unread. That is normal. It is also not a reason to skip the wire if the job you actually have is a dated URL.

Agencies blur the two on purpose. They pitch “media coverage,” then fulfil with a PR Newswire blast plus a hope-and-pray media list. The blast was always available without them. The list work is the part you are paying $1,500 and up for. Sometimes that labor is worth it. Often it is a markup on a form you could have submitted yourself.

Count live URLs. Ignore “potential impressions,” “media points,” and logo walls. A logo pack is not a citation. If the page 404s in a week, you bought a screenshot of a screenshot. For the USA Today version of this distinction — live URL on a real domain versus a journalist who works there — read what a USA Today press release actually is.

What you are actually buying

Every wire in this list is selling some mix of four things. The mix is the product. The brand on the invoice is not.

SEO vendors will try to sell a fifth thing: do-follow links from high-DR domains. That is a side effect of some circuits, not the purpose of a news wire. If you only want links, buy links and stay off the news tab. If you want a name in Google News and in assistant citations, you want a timestamped page on a trusted news domain. That is a different job. How Google News actually treats a release is the longer version.

Google News eligibility is about the host, not the invoice

Google News does not index “press releases.” It indexes pages on domains it already treats as news. A reprint on a spammy affiliate blog does not get you into the news carousel no matter which wire you paid. A page on a recognised publisher — the wire’s own site, AP News, USA Today, a finance masthead Google already crawls — can.

Business Wire, PR Newswire and GlobeNewswire have been Google News sources for years. Their own canonical pages routinely show up for tickered, dated, newsworthy copy. EIN’s own domain often does too, which is why SEO people like it. A syndication network does not magically mint Google News eligibility for every reprint partner. What matters is which hosts in the report are actually news sites. Cited’s Indexed package is sold as Google News indexing because the circuit includes hosts that qualify, not because a keyword was stuffed into a meta tag.

Eligibility is not ranking. A qualifying page can sit on page four. Thin copy, a name with no prior footprint, and a topic Google already has better sources for will not “win Google News.” What the wire can do is put a URL into the index in the right shape: timestamp, named person, specific fact, real news host. Assistants scrape the same shape. That is the whole theory of how Cited works, and it is why a $79 syndication hit can beat a $4,000 agency PDF that never went live.

Two more boring facts. First, Google can drop a publisher. A circuit that worked last year can be junk this year. Second, duplicate reprints of the same release do not each count as a separate news result. Google clusters them. You want one or two strong hosts, not 400 copies of the same paragraph on sites nobody has heard of.

How to read a quote without getting taken

Wire sales decks inflate three numbers: site count, impressions, and “equivalent ad value.” Site count includes every local affiliate and every language subdomain that might, in theory, pull the feed. Impressions are a guess about how many people could have loaded a page, not how many did. Ad-value calculators multiply those guesses by made-up CPMs. None of that is a URL.

Ask for a sample report from a release in your category, not a celebrity IPO. Look at the hosts. If the recognisable names are three finance sites and the rest are city-name blogs, that is a normal budget blast. If the recognisable names are the wire itself plus Yahoo Finance and a handful of trades, that is a normal premium blast. If the report is logos, walk.

Also ask what happens on rejection. Premium wires kill promotional copy. Budget wires kill the worst of it and let a lot of marketing language through. Cited validates against the distributor’s submission limits before anyone spends — word count, title length, contact fields — because a rejection after credits move is a real cost. Cheap wires that take anything will also put you next to anything. That has a price in how the page looks when a stranger googles your name.

EIN Newswire

EIN Newswire — sold as EIN Presswire on the site you actually use — is the default budget blast. The pitch is speed, a low door price, and a long tail of reprints that look like “distribution” in a spreadsheet. A basic run often starts around $99–$149. Higher tiers step into the low hundreds. Those figures move; EIN changes packages the way airlines change fares. Do not build a procurement sheet off a blog post, including this one. Look at the checkout the day you buy.

Who it is for: operators who need a dated URL and do not need a disclosure wire. Consultants, founders, authors, local companies, SEO shops. People who will be googled by a prospect, not priced by a securities lawyer.

Who it is not for: public-company material disclosure. IR teams do not use EIN as the official circuit, and they should not. Journalists who still watch the Cision and Business Wire inboxes do not treat an EIN slug as a filing. If your goal is a reporter at a national desk, EIN is the wrong instrument.

Pickup quality is mixed on purpose. You get volume. Some hosts are fine. Many are not. The EIN canonical page is the part that tends to matter for search. The long tail is decoration. Google News: the EIN domain itself is often eligible; the junk reprints are not. Editorial: looser than the premium three, tighter than a Medium post. They will bounce naked advertisements. They will not bounce a coaching launch written in third person.

The honest use is as a cheap public record. The dishonest use is as fake national coverage. If your landing page says “as seen in” and the only live link is EIN plus twenty city blogs, you are lying with a logo pack. Pay EIN for the URL. Do not dress it up as a media tour.

PR Newswire

PR Newswire is the legacy American wire, now inside Cision. This is the name civilians mean when they say “put it on the wire.” Newsrooms still have it in the stack. Investor-relations teams still use it as a disclosure circuit alongside Business Wire. The product is not a $99 blast. List pricing is quoted, not really published, and it usually lives in the high hundreds to the low thousands for a US national hit, then higher with extra circuits, multimedia, and targeting. Prices change. Word count is a lever. So is geography. Anyone selling “PR Newswire for $199” is either bundling a thin circuit, reselling a remnant, or not actually on PR Newswire.

Who it is for: public companies, agencies that already live in Cision, in-house comms teams, anyone who needs the copy to land in the same inbox as everyone else’s official news. If your counsel says the announcement is material, this is one of the three wires they will name.

Who it is not for: a personal brand with one fact and a screenshot in mind. You can pay PR Newswire to syndicate a founder launch. You will overpay for alerts you will not use and editorial friction you do not need. The reprints will look serious. The reporter still will not write about you unless the fact was already a story.

Pickup here includes finance sites people have actually heard of, because those sites subscribe to the feed. That is still pickup. Yahoo Finance running your text is not “I was on Yahoo.” It is Yahoo’s wire module doing what it does for thousands of releases a week. Useful for search. Useless as a personality claim. Google News: the PR Newswire domain is a source. Many of the finance reprints are too. Editorial: stricter than EIN, not as surgical as Business Wire. Promotional adjectives get cut or bounced.

The Cision overlay is the other product hiding in the invoice. Media lists, journalist targeting, monitoring. That is a database business, not a wire. Do not confuse a Cision seat with syndication. You can buy the wire without the seat. You cannot buy “the Cision effect” from a budget distributor by putting the word Cision in a blog post.

GlobeNewswire

GlobeNewswire sits in the same prestige band as PR Newswire with a heavier finance accent. It is the Notified wire, the one small-cap IR and biotech comms teams already have a login for. Circuits are built around investors, trades, and the Yahoo/MarketWatch class of reprint, not around “get this founder on Google.” Pricing lives in the same uncomfortable zone as the other premium wires: typically mid-hundreds into the thousands depending on circuit and extras. They quote. Prices change.

Who it is for: listed companies, pre-IPO shops that want to look listed, funds, medtech, anyone whose audience lives on a Bloomberg and a brokerage portal. If your release has a ticker, GlobeNewswire is in the shortlist with Business Wire and PR Newswire. If it does not, ask why you are there.

Who it is not for: a consultant announcing a new offer. GlobeNewswire will sometimes take it. You will look like a person who wandered into the IR office. The reprints may still include finance hosts, which is nice for domain authority and confusing for a reader who expected a 10-Q.

Pickup quality is high on the finance axis and ordinary everywhere else. Google News: yes, on the GlobeNewswire domain and on the usual finance reprints. Editorial: company-news shaped. They want a firm, a fact, a date. Soft personal copy is a misfit. If you are buying GlobeNewswire because a freelancer said “it’s better for SEO than EIN,” fire the freelancer. You are paying IR rates for an SEO job.

Business Wire

Business Wire is the Berkshire Hathaway wire and, in most rooms that care, the prestige pick. Word-count and circuit pricing. Usually the expensive one. Hundreds to thousands is the honest band; a long national release with extras is not a casual checkout. They quote. Prices change. There is no consumer SKU and no reason for them to invent one.

Who it is for: Fortune-scale comms, M&A, regulatory announcements, IR teams that will be asked in discovery “where did you disclose this.” If the copy has to exist as a clean, official artefact, Business Wire is the artefact people still point at.

Who it is not for: almost everyone reading this page. Business Wire’s editorial desk will not enjoy a personal press release about a course launch. They may bounce it. They may accept a rewritten, company-framed version and charge you as if you were disclosing a plant closure. Either way you bought a disclosure tool to do a findability job.

Pickup is the strongest of the five on recognised hosts, especially finance. Google News: the Business Wire domain is a source, and the reprint class is the one Google already treats as news. Alerts: this is one of the feeds desks actually watch. That still is not a promise of a rewritten story. It is a promise that the copy was in the pile. Editorial is the strictest of this set. That is the point. A Business Wire slug signals “this passed a grown-up filter.” An EIN slug signals “this was paid and formatted.” Both can be true and useful. They are not interchangeable social proof.

What Cited actually sells

Cited combines editorial drafting with third-party syndication. The distribution layer is the same class as EIN: syndication to a few hundred publisher sites, a report with live links, optional mastheads stacked on top. It is not a disclosure wire. It is not a newsroom terminal. It is a way to get a named person onto dated pages, including some hosts a stranger would recognise if you pay for those add-ons.

Cited’s retail, current as of this page:

À-la-carte, Famous is cheaper than stacking the same pieces. Agencies bill $1,500+ for reach in this neighbourhood, then add writing and account time. EIN’s basic blast often starts around $99–$149 before you have a writer. Cited includes the draft. You edit every word. Nothing in the customer path spends distribution credits; orders sit until a human submits. That is operational, not a slogan. A bounced release after the wire has taken money is how cheap operators lose the week.

Who budget syndication is for: the same human EIN is for, with a cleaner checkout if you want AP or USA Today as a line item instead of a scavenger hunt. Founders, consultants, operators, people who will be searched by name. Who it is not for: material disclosure, crisis comms, or anyone whose lawyer will ask which official wire you used.

Pickup is syndication. Some hosts are real. Many are not. Count the URLs you would actually paste in a proposal. Google News: possible on qualifying hosts, not on the whole 500. Editorial: wire-legal. Third person, 250–1,250 words, real facts, no invented quotes. If you do not have news, do not buy a release. A job title is not news. A launch, a hire, a book, a study, a new practice is.

Price, in bands, without a fake menu

If a comparison table lists “PR Newswire: $399 / 500 sites / Google News: yes” as if that were a public SKU, the table is fiction. Premium wires quote. Budget wires publish, then change the page. The useful picture:

Prices change. Taxes, word overages, photo fees, and “enhanced visibility” add-ons are how a $400 quote becomes $1,200. Get the quote in writing with the circuit named, the word limit, and a sample report. If they will not show a sample report, they do not want you to see the hosts.

Do not optimise for the lowest dollar per “site.” Optimise for the host you need. One usatoday.com URL can do more for a screenshot, a sales deck, and an assistant citation than eighty reprints on sites that look like they were generated by a script. That is why Cited prices USA Today and AP as separate line items instead of hiding them inside a vanity site-count.

Who should use which wire

Use Business Wire or PR Newswire if you are disclosing something a lawyer cares about, or if your audience is already trained to look for those slugs. Use GlobeNewswire if that audience is specifically investors and the copy has a ticker or wants one. Use EIN if you want the cheapest plausible public record and you will not pretend the long tail is national press. Use Cited if you want that public record written to be extractable — a sentence that still contains your name when a model lifts it — and you want AP or USA Today as an honest add-on instead of a surprise.

A few sharper cuts:

Mixing them is allowed. IR teams run Business Wire for the filing-shaped announcement and a cheaper circuit for a featurette. Founders use budget syndication for the personal record and later pay PR Newswire when there is a round and a counsel. What is not allowed is using the cheap circuit as evidence you “got national coverage,” or using the expensive circuit as evidence you “went viral.” Both are pipes.

What an agency is selling when it names a wire

An agency invoice that says PR Newswire is usually three stacked products: writing, the wire fee, and outreach. The middle one has a public-ish price. The other two are labor. $1,500+ is cheap for all three done well. It is a lot for a rewritten EIN blast and a media list from 2019.

Ask them to split the line. Writing. Wire, named, with circuit. Outreach, with a count of personalised pitches, not “we blasted 400 editors.” Monitoring. If they will not split it, you cannot tell whether you are buying Cision-grade syndication or a Canva one-pager. Cited does not do outreach. We write, you edit, Cited submits it for syndication. That is a smaller product. It is also the product most people who fill in a “get me in the news” form actually need on week one: a record, not a campaign.

If you already have coverage interest — a reporter asked for a fact sheet, a conference wants a URL, a Wikipedia editor wants a reliable source — buy the wire that produces the cleanest primary document. Premium if the audience is official. Budget if the audience is Google and ChatGPT. Do not buy both “just in case” unless you like paying twice for the same paragraph.

Editorial, word count, and what gets bounced

All five will bounce illegal, defamatory, or purely promotional copy, with different tolerances. Business Wire wants company news written like company news. PR Newswire and GlobeNewswire want something you could defend as an announcement. EIN and other budget wires will take a wider set of personal and small-company facts if you format them as news: third person, a date, a place, a named human, a specific thing that happened.

They will all bounce a first-person LinkedIn post pasted into the form. They will bounce superlatives you cannot source. They will bounce a release whose only fact is that you exist. That last one is the usual failure mode. “Jane Doe, a leading visionary in the wellness space, is excited to announce her presence” is an ad. “Jane Doe opened a clinic in Austin on 12 March and began taking patients for sports rehab” is a release. The wire is not a personality printer. It is a fact printer that happens to carry your name.

Word limits are not vibes. Premium wires charge by the inch. The distributor’s submission window is 250–1,250 words. Write to the fact, not to the cap. Assistants quote short standalone sentences. Reporters skim the lede. Nobody finishes a 1,200-word founder memoir on a wire page. Put the name, the number, and the date in sentence one. Repeat the name in any sentence you hope gets lifted. Pronouns die the moment the sentence leaves the page.

A working order of operations

Decide the job before you decide the vendor. If the job is disclosure, call the three premium wires and your counsel. If the job is findability, you need one qualifying news URL that names you and states a fact. That is a budget wire, with a masthead if you need the screenshot. If the job is a written story in a specific outlet, you need a pitch, not a feed.

Then write the fact as a release. Not a bio. Not a pitch. A release. Cited’s composer exists because people skip this and try to syndicate a brochure. If you already have the copy, you can still use a wire’s own form. If you do not, start a draft and cut everything that is not a fact.

Then look at a sample report from the circuit you are about to buy. Find the two or three hosts you actually want. If they are not in the sample, they will not appear by magic for you. Pay the add-on that names the host. Do not buy “maximum distribution” because the site count is bigger. Google will cluster the duplicates. Strangers will not read them.

After it ships, wait for the report. Click the links. Archive the ones that matter. Put the best URL on the about page, in the email signature, in the proposal footer. That is the entire downstream value of syndication: a citeable, dated, named page on a domain that is not yours. Everything else — vanity metrics, badge kits, “we got 2 million impressions” — is decoration for people who will not click.

What this comparison is not

It is not a claim that Cited is in the same prestige class as Business Wire. We are not. Cited serves the budget-to-mid syndication market with optional mastheads. Business Wire is a disclosure institution. If your problem is the second thing, go there. If your problem is “googling my name returns a LinkedIn stub and a forgotten guest post,” the expensive wire is mostly theatre.

It is not a claim that pickup will make you famous. Fame is a long project. Being findable is a URL. One release can put the URL in the world this week. It will not replace a body of work, a book, a company, or a scandal. People who promise otherwise are selling a different product than the one in the checkout.

It is not a live price list for EIN, PR Newswire, GlobeNewswire or Business Wire. Those firms change packages. We are not their sales desk. Cited’s own numbers — Indexed $79, Get known $149, Famous $399, USA Today $179, AP $199 — are the ones we will honour on the compose page. Everyone else’s should be checked on their site or on a quote, the day you buy, with the circuit named in the email.

If you want the longer versions of the two questions this page keeps leaning on: how a release gets into Google News, and what the USA Today placement actually is. If you already have the fact and you know which job you are hiring the wire for, write it and put it on the record.

Questions

What is the difference between pickup and coverage?

Pickup is syndication: a wire accepts your copy and publisher sites reprint it. The headline and quotes stay yours. Coverage is a journalist writing their own story. EIN, PR Newswire, GlobeNewswire and Business Wire sell pickup. None of them sell a reporter assignment.

Which press release wire is cheapest?

Budget syndication starts in the low hundreds and sometimes under $100. Cited starts at $79 for Indexed (300+ sites), $149 for Get known (500+), and $399 for Famous, including writing, distribution and reporting. EIN Newswire often starts around $99–$149 for a basic blast; those packages change. PR Newswire, GlobeNewswire and Business Wire are typically quoted in the high hundreds to thousands. Agencies start around $1,500+.

Does a press release get you into Google News?

Google News indexes pages on domains it already treats as news, not “press releases” as a category. Business Wire, PR Newswire, GlobeNewswire and often EIN’s own domain qualify. Syndicated reprints only help when the host is a real news site. Duplicate reprints get clustered. Eligibility is not ranking.

When should I use PR Newswire or Business Wire instead of a budget wire?

Use PR Newswire, Business Wire or GlobeNewswire for material disclosure, IR, and any announcement a lawyer will later ask you to prove you published on an official circuit. Use EIN or another budget wire when the job is a dated, citable URL for a named person — founders, consultants, operators — not a securities filing.

What does Cited add beyond a wire?

Cited combines drafting, distribution and reporting. Indexed is $79, Get known $149, Famous $399, USA Today $179, and AP News $199. We draft the release so a lifted sentence still contains your name; you edit every word; a human submits so credits do not spend in checkout. The wire is one part of the service; Cited handles the writing, checkout, fulfilment and report.

Will journalists call me after I pay a wire?

Almost never, and never as a deliverable. Premium wires still land in newsroom systems, which slightly raises the chance a desk sees the copy. That is not coverage. If you need a reporter to write about you, pitch them. Use the wire so that coverage, and Google, have a primary source to cite.