October 22, 2025

What is a Newswire and Which Is Best for Public Biotechs?

When a biotech issues press releases, there are six principal ways those releases find their way to interested parties:

1. They are typically issued over a newswire.
2. They are posted to a biotech’s website/ IR website.
3. They are sent as an email to a curated list of contacts (a Friends of XXXX List) that typically includes investors, bankers, analysts, partners, and stakeholders.
4. If you have engaged a PR company, they will typically send the text of your press release via email as part of any pitch they make to journalists (or sometimes just as an FYI).
5. They are sent out via automated email to those who have signed up for alerts on your IR website (if your website has that functionality – most do).
6. If a release is material, it will also be filed on Form 8k and thus be available on the SEC’s EDGAR system.

This blog is principally going to talk about newswires – since they are frequently misunderstood.

Let’s start with what a newswire is:

A newswire is an organization whose business is to editorialize and distribute press releases. They do this via five main mechanisms:

• They keep an up-to-date database of journalists’ contact details and their areas of special interest, which they keep current through regular surveys. When pertinent press releases are issued, the newswire sends them to relevant journalists via email.
• Newswires also operate an electronic feed that finance professionals and the likes of Bloomberg, Reuters, Yahoo Finance, Morningstar, etc. draw from.
• In addition, they operate their own website on which every one of their releases can be found, and which is easily found by Google or other search engines.
• Also, newswires’ downstream media partners, like, for example, the Associated Press, syndicate their content across hundreds of additional outlets and endpoints. It is, in fact, this widespread syndication that helps biotechs meet their RegFD disclosure requirements when they issue their press releases using a newswire.
• Lastly, AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, etc. use newswires to inform their training and provide answers about biotechs when investors, consumers and other stakeholders inquire about them.

At this point, and given the above, let me address three questions frequently asked by my clients:

How does my press release appear on my website?

Post-IPO, your website should have the capability to automatically update with any release containing your NASDAQ or NYSE ticker. Releases are pulled from newswire feeds upon issue and can take a couple of minutes to populate on your website, once issued.

How does my press release appear on the Yahoo Finance app?

Since it comes pre-installed on every iPhone, the Yahoo Finance App has become the default stock tracking app. As such, this is how lots of CEOs and CFOs check their own stock price. Yahoo Finance picks up press releases via a newswire’s feed to populate the news sections of the stocks it covers. Other financial news aggregators work similarly.

If journalists receive my press releases automatically via the newswire, why do I need a PR company to pitch them?

Well, on rare occasions, you don’t, but most of the time you do. Journalism remains a “people business” and to get a human being to take the time to write-up your news (and possibly spend time interviewing a company spokesperson), a warm, relationship-based approach works best.

Journalists also like exclusives, which again can only be brokered by PR companies. Nevertheless, journalists have and do respond to press releases sent to them directly by newswires, which are often the genesis of an article or feature.

There is one other point I want to make before I talk about the principal newswires that biotechs use.

In each of the above situations, a press release is distributed in a form that differs from the one you created it in. Usually, press releases are composed in Word, but when they appear anywhere on a website they have been transformed into HTML. Similarly, when journalists (or the members of your Friends of XXXX List) receive it, it appears as text in an email.

Your press release is not the Word document you created, or even a PDF version of the Word document. It is the text contained therein – and distributed in a variety of formats.

As such, do not waste senior management time (or worse, non-executive time) correcting insignificant inconsistencies in font or spacing when you are helping draft a press release.

Also note that press releases are editorialized by a newswire’s staff before they are issued (unless you request otherwise), which gives one last set of eyes on the content (and any inactive hyperlinks or erroneous footnotes it may contain), as one last quality check.

Who are the leading newswires?

In the U.S. biotech industry, there are three principal newswire players:

• GlobeNewswire (part of Notified, once part of NASDAQ).
• Business Wire (part of Berkshire Hathaway).
• PR Newswire (part of Cision).

Since GlobeNewswire and Business Wire have special arrangements in place with NASDAQ and the NYSE, respectively, for newly public companies (they are part of the respective exchanges’ free/subsidized IR packages), these are the newswires biotechs most typically use.

If a biotech uses PR Newswire, it is typically when they are private (before they inevitably switch over to Globe or Business Wire).

In terms of price and service, there is little to choose between Globe Newswire and Business Wire. Both do a professional job, and both are (on rare occasion) also capable of hiccups. Both also offer a range of distribution choices – such as USA National, a biotech-specific distribution, or a regional distribution – all at different prices.

Typically, biotechs utilize cheaper regional circuits for things like perfunctory/advisory releases for webcasts or healthcare investor conference attendance, and issue more important releases using larger or biotech specific circuits.

In my experience, PR companies like to issue releases themselves and charge a mark-up on newswires’ pricing, in addition to whatever retainer or fees they are charging you, while IR firms prefer for you to contract with, and be billed directly by, a newswire (with no mark-up). Once a contract is in place, IR firms are then given permission by their clients to set up releases on their behalf.

Once your subsidized IPO newswire package has expired (typically 3 years after IPO) it’s best to buy a package of releases from a newswire to obtain a lower average price per release. Your IR firm will be aware of exactly what each of its other clients are paying, so they should be able to help you get a good deal.