That would require that the "journalist" pay attention and not just directly look through their pile of releases for a "story". News departments are lazy and don't want to pay for real news, they want it spoon-fed.
It is way easier for a journalist to go to lunch, accept flattery for his sharp style and leadership in his field, and then walk home and copy-paste the text handed to him, than sift through the same pile of press releases that every other journalist in the industry is also sifting through.
There is nothing wrong with the concept of a press release, particularly when used as intended, as a starting point for a piece of journalism.
In the media we write many different kinds of stories. Some are the vast investigative pieces that put the world to rights and might one day win a Pulitzer prize, but others are simply humdrum announcements of new products or services. I'd have thought that a community of founders would appreciate the value engendered by outlets that gather eyeballs for particular sectors and spread the sort of bread and butter news that is press released day in day out by stakeholders in those sectors -- usually after having first removed the hype, dubious claims ("World's first!") misrepresentation ("A and B have partnered to..." when it means A has bought/licensed something from B) and fluff ("We are excited to...", "This development reaffirms our commitment to...") that the authors of the press releases have inevitably included.
The simple truth is that press releases were not designed for direct consumption by the public, and sites that reproduce them verbatim do nobody any favours. However, in many circumstances several outlets could legitimately run very similar stories based on the same press release, and deliver great value in doing so because they all reach different audiences. Using a press release as a source is not in every case a dirty little secret that needs to be exposed by clever software.
Addressing the point made in the parent post, it seems to me there is a bit of a disconnect in assuming that one can take a journalist to lunch, tell him how very clever he is, and then hand him copy-paste text. Wouldn't work on anyone I know...
I think worrying over the influence of PR amounts to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, "news" ("The lie that something important happens every day") is much more fundamentally broken, as per this article that was discussed a while ago:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf...
Perhaps the business model would fail less if you made the companies pay for their product placement versus giving them billions of dollars in free adspace? I'd rather the adverts get called out explicitly versus lazy rehashings of an uninteresting, possibly factually inaccurate release that someone used as the majority of their "story". It's not interesting, it's not insightful.
Neither do users.
This also covers the ad-supported local/national or cable subscription-based news coverage. Neither are "free", but all of them (and especially the 24/7 media) fall victim to regurgitating these releases as "news" to fill the gap where "expensive" news would do far more good in between the celebrity gossip.