I’m not a big fan of news distribution services, I think the model is broke and the don’t really serve enough value to journalists, but we can’t ignore the fact that the three major services in Canada are certainly making efforts to be more relevant to the world of communications. Canada News, MarketWire and BusinessWire have all had a series of updates to their back end technology and in some cases made some acquisition such as MarketWire did when it snapped up social media monitoring service Sysmos, earlier this week. BusinessWire has had a number of management changes in the last two years which will certainly have in impact on the company’s ability to grow but perhaps current Country Manager Canada Darlene Webb will be able to take the company the distance.
All three companies have some serious funding behind them which will also prepare them for future acquisitions, but what will they buy next? If they are smart they will help their clients get their news out the door sooner as the “real-time web” continues to be force for news distribution. Social media services such as Twitter and Facebook have quickly become the first sources that people turn to get up to the minute news. Last week Twitter became the go to service for people across the world trying to find out information about the earthquake that hit major cities across North America.
There is a battle happening for consumer attention and services that help brands get their message into the the hands of their target audience today vs. tomorrow will win the race, after all there can only be one.