A lot of A/E/C/Environmental firms announce promotions once a year, so they send one press release announcing multiple promotions to the local papers and business press, professional magazines and newsletters, their college publications, and (if the firm is a nationally-recognized name) maybe some national magazines. A collection of headshots generally accompanies this press release.
In some firms, new hire press releases are handled in the same way—multiple new staff members are written up in one big announcement, with multiple headshots accompanying the press release.
In two of the five firms where I have been part of in-house marketing staff, I have sent out such multiple-person announcements because that's the way the firm wanted it. Nothing I said could change their "we've-always-done-it-this-way" methodology. And the results were always the same.
The governing problem is that no marketing person in an A/E/C/ Environmental firm can control how many of those multiple promotions will make it into the publication's relevant column. That choice is determined by the person at the publication who runs the relevant column, based on the amount of space available in that issue, the importance of the person in the firm's hierarchy, whatever interesting "hook" the writer can get into an individual's write-up, or some other factor which the marketing person may never figure out.
Every time I have been forced to send out such a multi-person press release, the local newspaper or business press chose a few people and left the others out of the column. The result is one or more people visiting my office, copy of the publication in hand, angry because their promotion wasn't announced along with the others. And I have to show them the multi-person press release and explain that the publication makes the choice, not me. When they leave my office, they are no longer angry at me, but they are still angry.
Something similar happens when the person whose name and picture made the paper sees that his carefully crafted paragraph has been pared down to one sentence. or that he/she now shares one sentence with two other people who were promoted to the same position. I have to make the same explanation about space availability and press releases with multiple subjects.
And then there's the case of national trade magazines such as Engineering News-Record (ENR). On various occasions, the good folks at ENR have told me that they are not interested in promotions below the Vice President, or sometimes the Division Manager, level.
One alternative is separate mailings/emails for each promotion or new staff member. This has its own pitfalls. It doesn't matter whether you send all of them out in one envelope, send each in a separate envelope, or stagger them and mail one announcement every week. Upon receiving the second announcement, the recipient remembers your firm but not the name of the subject, so he thinks "I got this last week" and drops it in the "round file." By the third or fourth announcement, the recipient is getting annoyed that you are sending the same release over and over to get it published.
You just can't win for losing!