As a health care and financial blogger over the last five plus years, I’ve used releases probably a couple dozen times until recently. Now I write about stocks, and a lot of stories are pegged to earnings reports announced in news releases. But most often, I just link to the releases and conference call transcripts and devote most of my blog to analysis and commentary based on data I find around the net.

I don’t get many news releases, and I almost never use the ones I get, because they aren’t pertinent. Few know my e-mail addresses, which I don’t publish at this point. What I do is seek out the earnings reports that look interesting and build on the data that they report.

Financial reporting, of course, is different from blogging on new gadgets, videos and personalities.

If you don’t want news releases, don’t give out your e-mail address. Sign up for the PR and Business Wire services and select the ones that will work for you, or work without them.

You can sneer at flacks, but imho, you’re just saying that your blog isn’t meant to report news but to make it. If you don’t use news releases directly, I’m guessing you’re commenting on news that originated with a news release at some point or you’re just commenting on events that you witness or read about or experience, all of which are ok. Just understand that some use news releases and some may or may not, and that’s ok, too.

And, yes, I too comment on a log of blogs and boards as well as write my own blogs.