For weeks leading up to it, there was a lot of news coverage about Amazon Prime Day. In the days afterwards, many news outlets have been issuing analysis about it.
Do companies pay for these kinds of stories to be written about them? It seems really excessive for a sales promotion to get as much media coverage as Prime Day did.
Never heard of it. What’s Prime Day?
They apparently didn’t pay enough. 
Companies will very often write their own press releases. Reporters like them because it means less work for the reporter.
I have no idea how it works for the big guys, but when I worked for a small business several decades ago, the company owner knew exactly who to shmooz to get a reporter to come in and do a feature on our local business and how it was benefiting the local economy. No money exchanged hands (that I’m aware of) but it was kinda like you give us free advertising and our tax dollars will help out your local township.
If the little guys do it, you can bet the big guys do it too, presumably on a bigger scale.
I can imagine someone as big as Amazon approaching a reporter and saying hey, this is gonna be big, you’re going to want to be the one to break the story so you get the readers, so here’s the story all typed out for you and ready to go, all you have to do is print it. Basically, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.
“We’ll give you Prime free for six months…” 
Here’s a thread from a couple weeks ago where I asked this same question. But where nobody could believe I didn’t know. Apparently it’s quite the thing these days for shopaholics.
Amazon did pay for some articles on Buzzfeed (Buzzfeed clearly marks their paid-for pieces). Buzzfeed also wrote their own pieces, as “what to buy on Amazon” is a regular topic for them. So on Prime Day there was a whole paid-for feature section plus 3-6 Buzzfeed articles about Prime Day.
Prime Day is just like Black Friday and geez, how many stories do you see about Black Friday? And then Cyber Monday. There’s always a ton, but you don’t think “is someone paying for this exposure?” because the “event” is open to all businesses. Prime Day is the exact same thing, it just happens to take place in July and is only related to one business.
Prime Day is also making legit economic news because it’s legit making tons of money for one company, and “taking over Black Friday.” So you’ve got a lot of outlets reporting on that aspect of it.
One of our local news channels has a “deals guy” and he had stories about deals all week (Amazon starts deals for certain departments and sectors early, and also releases news about some deals early - just like Black Friday). So any show that features segments on “deals” will have a Prime Day segment.
So now you’ve got one of the top millennial news sources (Buzzfeed) all talking about it, financial news talking about it, and some small news segments about it - no doubt other news outlets are going to say “hey this is a thing people are talking about, we’d better do a news story on it.”
Cuz that’s how news works, really.
I’m impressed with the coverage Amazon gets. How many books can people buy?
On CNN.com’s front page the week before Prime Day, half the articles were about Trump and the other half were basically PREPARE FOR PRIME DAY
They’ve expanded into a few other lines of business nowadays. 
I just bought a vacuum cleaner from Amazon.
My lawnmower came from Amazon.
My lawn came from Amazon.
I didn’t believe Chronos hadn’t heard of it either until you posted. It was everywhere. And no, it’s bizarre to believe that Amazon paid for all that coverage. How would that possibly work?
Neither had I.
Evidently not.
Never make assumptions that everyone’s experience is the same as your own. 
Jeez. We need some better informed moderators around here! 
In standard, mainstream journalism, this is considered completely unethical. A journalistic publication should not accept payment to run a story. When I worked in the industry, we did occasionally get offers like this, and they were promptly shut down. And press releases should never be run as-is in any publication worth its snuff.
At any rate, Prime Day is newsworthy for the reasons mentioned by other posters in this thread. There’s no reason Amazon would have to pay to get exposure.
I live in Panama. I don’t watch news on TV or read it on the Internet. I get most of my news from the international edition of The Miami Herald. Maybe the Herald had an article on it but I’ve been in remote parts of New Guinea for the past month. You may be surprised to learn that coverage of this was quite spotty in the Arfak Mountains of Irian Jaya.
Why should they pay? It’s a legitimate news story as well as being a promotional event. Amazon is such a big company that most things it does are newsworthy. Should the media not have reported when they started competing with traditional companies in the market, or when they started drone delivery?
A significant percentage of Americans use Amazon. If you had gone to the site at all in the weeks leading up to the actual day, there were notices of upcoming Prime Day all over. What sort of makes it “news” is that there were a few bargain items below any previous price for the item. I happen to have grabbed a new phone, but there was also a chance to grab an Occulus Rift for $300, and a number of other deals.
My point is :
a. I seriously doubt Amazon payed any news outlets for the coverage. So many people use Amazon that these articles were of genuine interest to many of their readers.
b. Unlike, say, Mattress stores that offer endless perpetual sales, a few of the things sold on Prime Day actually were cheaper than anywhere else you could get it, anywhere in the world, for the last for months at least. Probably Amazon was losing money on some items.
I never heard of Prime Day either, until this thread. It may be relevant that I just came back from being on vacation for about a month, and paid little attention to the news while I was gone. Just saw the major headlines, which were always about the latest Trump shenanigans.
Eta: Being on vacation, I didn’t do any shopping, so I didn’t visit Amazon at all during that period.