PR Newswire
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PR Newswire is a U.S-based company that is primarily in the business of disseminating corporate news releases to the news media, financial institutions and web sites. The company's customers include corporations, government agencies, labor organizations, PR agencies, and non-profit entities. Through PR Newswire, these organizations send full-text news releases, audio and video broadcasts and webcasts, and multimedia news distributions to the mainstream media, the investment community, government decision-makers, and the general public.
Publicly-held corporations in the United States use PR Newswire as a method of reaching the investment and financial news community simultaneously with important news and announcements, thus achieving the standard of "simultaneous disclosure" demanded by financial markets and regulatory agencies. This has been a major driver of business for the company.
Headquartered in New York, PR Newswire has offices in 11 countries and sends news to outlets in 135 countries. The company’s brands and services include ProfNet, eWatch, MEDIAtlas, MultiVu, U.S. Newswire, Vintage Filings, MediaRoom and MediaSense. It also has agreements with global news agencies such as Bloomberg, the Associated Press, Dow Jones and Reuters to send information directly to newsrooms worldwide. PR Newswire is a subsidiary of United Business Media plc of London.
[edit] History
PR Newswire was established in New York in 1954 by Herb Muschel and pioneered the concept of distributing corporate news releases "by wire." Prior to its establishment, companies issuing press releases to the New York media had to messenger or mail individual copies of their news releases to the city’s daily newspapers and news services. With PR Newswire, companies could send a single copy of their release to PR Newswire's newsroom, where it would be simultaneously transmitted to the city's major media points.
Muschell later sold PR Newswire to Western Union, which had provided the telecommunications lines and teleprinters that supported the service.
PR Newswire created its Investors Research Wire in 1965, which disseminated corporate news releases directly to brokerage firms and financial analysts, thereby for the first time bypassing the news media and directly reaching the end-consumers of corporate news. In 1967, the company went national with the acquisition of the local Los Angeles wire service.
Although PR Newswire invented its business model, in the 1960s and 1970s a number of regional companies sprung up in major U.S. cities to distribute news releases to their local media. The most successful of these, Business Wire, was founded n San Francisco in 1961, expanded to a national company in the 1970s and 1980s, and remains PR Newswire's major competitor.
In 1972, PR Newswire began using electronic terminals for copyediting, and in 1978 the company went fully digital with the adoption of the Associated Press' computerized message handling and transmission system.
In 1982, the company was purchased by United Newspapers plc (today known as United Business Media plc) of London in 1982, PR Newswire continued to expand its presence throughout the decade, largely through acquisition, beginning with the purchase of Philadelphia-based Mediawire in 1983. By the end of the 1980s, many U.S. dailies and financial institutions took PR Newswire directly into their internal information systems. PR Newswire also began archiving[clarify] news releases on electronic databases, including NEXIS (now LexisNexis).
In 1996, PR Newswire made news releases available via Web with the launch of www.prnewswire.com. In 2002 PR Newswire started its own broadcast and Webcast production company, MultiVu, whose services include video news releases (VNRs), audio news releases (ANRs), satellite and radio media tours (SMTs and RMTs), public service announcements (PSAs), electronic multimedia kits (EMKs), and webcasting.
In October 2006, PR Newswire acquired U.S. Newswire from Medialink.
In April 2007, PR Newswire acquired the privately held Vintage Filings company.
In August 2007, PR Newswire acquired Notilog.
In Jan 2008, PR Newswire acquired Hismark,LLC
[edit] Distribution
PR Newswire distributes news to reach mainstream outlets, to over 78 categories of industry trade media, more than 4,000 Web sites and PR Newswire for Journalists, a digital media channel serving nearly 100,000 registered journalists across the globe. PR Newswire also provides services to public companies to assist in meeting SEC and all the major exchange disclosure requirements, including distribution to key disclosure media.
PR Newswire continues to expand its online distribution channels. As of early 2007, PR Newswire has distributed news to over 4,000 Web sites, databases and news aggregators - such as Yahoo!, Google, AOL, MSN, MarketWatch, Factiva, Dow Jones, Bloomberg, Reuters, Thomson Financial, LexisNexis and Comtex. PR Newswire has partnered with Technorati to strengthen its RSS feeds and has more than 688 RSS news feeds, 188 of which are public RSS feeds including geographical as well as industry/subject feeds. PR Newswire also distributes RSS feeds to over 500 journalists in English, German, Spanish and French. In addition, PR Newswire also provides customers with the strategic tools to measure the effectiveness of their media campaigns with products such as eWatch.
