Encyclopedias posing as comic books. The challenge for the major electronic news distributors is to make mountainous amounts of material available in easily-digestible chunks in a friendly format.
Thanks to well-signposted web sites featuring clear navigation, they mostly succeed despite having to field hundreds of press releases and photographs per hour. Frequent visitors by-and-large know what these sites contain, and where.
However, a period of radical, even frenzied change has already begun. Technological advances mean that the corporate newswires – primarily market leaders PR Newswire and Business Wire – are providing audio, video and other new services. Faced with fierce competition from one another and from outsiders (other well-established news providers as well as tinkering nerds in garages), the newswires are forming links and alliances across a wide area. Formerly clear boundaries are being blurred.
IROs who monitor these changes will be better placed to exploit potentially valuable new services, and also to understand the shifting ways in which their constituencies – analysts, fund managers, journalists and others – are accessing information.
In addition to posting releases on their web sites, PRN and BW send them directly to media organizations and the financial community on private lines and in databases. But with the web came bells and whistles. Both companies are now using innovative means to entice journalists back to their sites on a regular basis by providing extra resources for researching stories.
According to the claims of BW senior VP Michael Lissauer, more than 90 per cent of American public companies now use either Business Wire or PR Newswire. But the US alone is no longer good enough – either for the wire services or their clients. ‘We’re investing in direct activities overseas because so many of our clients think globally and act globally that we have to do the same,’ says Ian Capps, president and CEO of PR Newswire.
PR Newswire’s PRN International (www.prninternational.com) now has affiliate partnerships in Asia, Europe and Latin America. Similarly, Business Wire now has affiliates in London, Paris, Tokyo, Canada and Latin America.
Again, though, just being in a position to provide global reach is no longer enough. The wire services are having to add on extra goodies to keep clients on side. Accordingly, Minneapolis-based E-Watch is collaborating with BW on ReleaseWatch, which tracks news releases in usenet groups and listServs (mass deliveries of e-mails, newsletters and the like). Also from Minneapolis, PRN screens television news programs ‘as part of our ‘air check’ to search for stories that were originally distributed by PR Newswire.’
Business Wire also has a strategic marketing and data exchange alliance with CCBN, a Boston internet shareholder communication service. BW’s clients who subscribe to Corporate News on the Net receive stock quotes, interactive historical stock charts, and enhanced SEC filings. According to BW, it also ‘markets CCBN’s internet service for creating customized investor relations sections for corporate web sites.’
No let up
Capps at PR Newswire is convinced that the demand from clients for more and more ways of delivering news will not let up: it’s fueled by technology. ‘The old wire service was simply to achieve wide disclosure and that still has a valuable role,’ he says. ‘But today’s IROs want much, much more than that. They want to be able to get the message out in more forms and to more people.’
Multimedia press releases, streaming video and audio, spreadsheets, slides, coffee meetings, snow reports. In electronic news distribution as in most industries today, innovation is transparent, and competitive advantage does not last long. PR Newswire has a Feature News service, whereas Business Wire offers E-mail Select, an e-mail delivery service for corporate customers. Leapfrogging means they will remain roughly head-to-head, increasingly indistinguishable from one another. Although, obviously, they’ll tell you otherwise.
Another prime-time player, Canada NewsWire, co-owned by PR Newswire and the UK’s Two-Ten Communications, is just as eager to innovate. For example, portions of CNW’s radio program, Canada’s Business Report, are available on the web site in streaming audio. It also provides releases in French and English and enables searches according to category, date, industry, keyword, organization, stock symbol and subject.
The big players are also being latched onto by the smaller wires in other markets. In the UK, for example, Business Wire has partnered with NewsDesk, an internet-based release distributor which is limited to high-tech news and has a limited number of corporate subscribers. Smaller still is Britain’s PRNet, but it covers all industries and, like NewsDesk, can be personalized. PRNet also contains Hollis PR Guide and other information. By such offerings, these smaller sites make themselves valuable if not indispensable to journalists.
Personal service
News Profiles is America OnLine’s powerful personalized press release retrieval service, and it illustrates the ways in which internet service providers, search engines and distributors cooperate as well as compete with one another.
AOL’s News Profiles are available to all subscribers, not just journalists. It conducts searches according to guidelines provided by the user. With a maximum of five search categories at one time, the engine trawls through Associated Press International, AP Entertainment, a weather and a sports source, as well as BW and PRN.
AOL’s Bertelsmann stablemate, CompuServe, retains powerful news-delivery capability, too, and users seem to remain loyal to it. Reuters, Press Association, the BBC and numerous UK and international online newspapers and magazines – and their archives – are easily available, along with numerous sources of financial and corporate news and forums. IROs should not underestimate the amounts of information – and misinformation – that are exchanged in such professional forums and usenet groups.
A once-familiar name may also be making a comeback. United Press International has teamed up with Microsoft to provide ‘customized news’ on demand. UPI has also formed a partnership with Median Emerging Markets to transmit real-time data on emerging financial markets in 47 countries.
When comprehensive journalistic research is required, bigger is best. But the larger providers can be slow or unwieldy, despite excellent navigation. And with push technology in its infancy, masses of chaff arrive with the few grains of personalized, bona fide wheat. The vast internet ocean has room enough for plenty of small fry among the voracious whales and sharks.
