Do Corporate Press Releases Drive Media Coverage?

We examine the role of voluntary corporate press releases about firms’ financial performance as a stimulus for financial media coverage. We find that there is a spike of media articles on the same day and one trading day following firms’ press releases. We provide evidence that managers compete for media attention and can use voluntary press releases to increase their firms’ media coverage; a firm’s issuance of press releases attracts more media articles about the firm leading to greater abnormal returns and trading volumes. Our results are robust to controlling for firm characteristics, different model specifications as well as regular earnings announcements, which have been the focus of prior literature. We also show that our inferences are not sensitive to managers’ duty to disclose material information to investors. Collectively, our findings suggest that media coverage decisions can be influenced by a firm.