Successful ideas become successful because they fill needs. The basic idea for 121five.com came from a major vendor at Sun 'n Fun in 2007. He asked freelance aviation writer, consultant and publicist Tim Kern what he could do to get his press releases more-widely published. “We spend all this money on advertising,” he said, “and still, we can't rely on getting our press releases out.”

There are several reasons why print media do not print all the press releases they receive. For one thing, they don't have the space; for another, they don't want to be scooped by other publications which they know are getting the same press release. In addition, press releases often have short shelf lives, and by the time a print publication gets into the hands of its subscribers, the news is old.

All those reasons, though, don't solve the industry's problem. Legacy online publications don't face the same size restrictions, but they do have the same problem with presentation, in that they don't want to publish the same things other such publications present, so they introduce another problem: they often re-write press releases, sometimes making the final presentation less-accurate or losing some of the nuances. Sometimes these changes actually alter the message. Worse, one daily online publication is famous for interjecting editorial comment into news releases, sometimes turning what should have been positive exposure into negative news!