It's an outdated business model fundamentally designed around publicly traded companies. For them, issuing releases on "the wire" is a requirement as a means of distributing news.

For a startup, I cannot recommend enough against a wire issuance, unless you are specifically in the financial community (or some other specific niche that I'm not thinking of). You can still "issue" a press release simply by putting it on your blog, emailing it to the press, etc. When I was running my marketing firm (www.stagetwo.com), we probably issued 100+ releases, with less than 5 hitting a wire service.

Establishing a relationship with a reporter is far better than writing a press release. Dmitry Dragilev, formally of ZURB, wrote an excellent article on how startups (and larger businesses) can do this: http://mashable.com/2012/02/27/how-to-pitch-media/

They're almost purely vestigial at this point. They may have some small SEO value, but that's about it.

Press releases are a vanity. Something for PR firms to charge clients for. Totally useless for small companies.

Fiverr.com is your friend ;)

if you're looking to get blacklisted