Press Releases/ Newswires for SEO?

I first stumbled upon the word a couple of weeks before and have been researching about it since then. Now here is how I believe the whole process is going down 😛 TAGEND

You pay a PR company to publish your( newsworthy) content to a platform (?) that news organizations have access to. They choose to report about the story if they think it’s relevant. You get referral traffic,( mostly no follow) backlinks and awareness.

I am no expert. I think that the backlinks from decent to very good sites are quite valuable, even when they are nofollow. Also the referral traffic+ branded searches on Google surely show Google that you indeed are relevant.

BUT I don’t know much about the whole process and the effects. Almost voices a bit too good to be true honestly. What do you guys suppose ??