Canada Newswire surviving the downturn

Back in the day those who wanted to promote a big event would employ a wire service to get it out there.
  In Canada that has meant Canada Newswire, which puts them on their site and into newsrooms via certain programs.
  Those who spend money on such announcements do it in the hopes that a mainstream media outlet would see it and pick it up and publicize it.
   The service was not cheap, in fact I wrote a press release for an organization a few years back that cost well over $500 for the group. The story was not picked up anywhere and it seemed like a bit of a waste in retrospect.
  And while all sorts of organizations have stopped buying print ads in newspapers and magazines, it appears that CNW is still going strong, with plenty of new press releases coming out every day.
   Apparently linking news announcements via your Twitter account isn't considered effective enough and Craigslist doesn't have a newswire section, so the wire services have dodged a bullet on that one.
   So I don't know if announcements are down on the wire services, but some groups are certainly not slowing down.
 One the CNW's top local clients is the City of Montreal, which has put out well over 8,000 press releases through the site over the last five years. Let's say each of those ads cost them $500, well do the math. (I mean it: do the math, I'm not very good at math!). It would be something like $4 million for that service alone.
   My experience working in the media is that those looking for stories don't look at the wire much, one looking to publicize some corporate news might be better off pestering a beat reporter, bloggers, or trying to feed a story directly to a Canadian Press reporter in the hopes that they will write it up.