Thanks for the further insight.

For me it comes down to a question of what a company’s rights are. The SEC guidance provides the ability for companies to use all available technologies to disclose information to their stakeholders (as long as the 3 criteria are met).

As companies begin to make new choices, aggregators, corporations and professional investors will quickly adapt to consume this information. As I mentioned in my previous comment, look at Yahoo and Google along with the next-gen Bloomberg companies for evidence of this.

I also challenge the idea that corporate end-users do not already rely heavily on the Web and related Internet technologies to drive their investment/trading strategies. The days of relying on one source for information are no longer.

In fact, Business Wire has to serve corporations and multiple audiences that move financial markets. That means addressing all of their varying needs to ensure an efficient flow of information. As such, we built and patented our own delviery network, called “NX” that we’ve installed at disclosure points, aggregators and financial information sites to ensure to-the-second simultaeous delivery of market-moving corporate news. That’s an investment of millions of dollars to move ever-more sophisticated content. Our clients and audiences demand it.

The wide ranges of audiences we reach include investors that may not be familiar with RSS feeds (I know my folks don’t pass that test) as well as professional investor services, that require rich tagged material to parse into their systems. Notice-and-access doesn’t provide the content or speed they need to serve their needs.

So while some may have the luxury to advocate for one specific audience or platform, Business Wire must serve a wide range of needs – all of which are important in our capital markets. We have technology that frankly, if it didn’t exist, would be created to serve the need we successfuly fill.

This approach is permitted for Business Wire’s owner Berkshire Hathaway, but the company won’t do the same for it’s clients.

By forcing its clients to issue full text releases, Business Wire is ensuring that investors have no incentive to visit companies’ websites, which in turn prevents company websites from being a “recognized channel” for disclosure.

I think I’ve answered my own question. It’s not in Business Wire’s interests for investors to access information anywhere other than through Business Wire.

I guess the point here is that email alerts, RSS and things like Twitter are used today by the bulk of end users to be notified of news. Whether on the BW site, Yahoo!, Google, Twitter or the 1000s of sites out there – people subscribe to email alerts, RSS feeds and social networks like Twitter to get their information. The reality is that the majority of people don’t visit web sites on their own anymore – they get notified by various methods and then click a link. So although the BW network gets the news to the aggregators, they (and BW themselves) then use these web technologies to notify end users.

So the question is – if it’s good enough for BW and the aggregators to deliver news in this way why can’t the company provide the same directly?

On this note, aggregators are quick to adapt and have already changed their sites to allow for blog content (updated by RSS) to be displayed right alongside press releases (check out Yahoo!Finance or Google Finance). Another great example of the change taking place is to look at the next generation Bloomberg’s in the market like FirstRain, Kapow, InfoGen and SkyGrid. These services obtain, analyze and index research from the web in real-time. Very soon Bloomberg will follow suit to stay relevant.

One way that BW and others could help in the transition would be to recognize notice and access (N&A) press releases as an acceptable hybrid. It’s going to take some time for web disclosure to be adopted by the mass market, during this time N&A is a great way for issuers to leverage the benefits of both systems.

Thanks for the opportunity to comment.

While Business Wire clearly sees that companies can and should do more to leverage web technologies to further their transparency efforts, we stand firm on the need for broad-based simultaneous disclosure of market-moving news.

Website posting, blogs, email and RSS feeds do not provide split-second simultaneous delivery of news to a wide range of information sources. They are dependent on a whole host of factors from which scraper is being used for an RSS feed and how often it scrapes a site, to they myriad issues with email delivery, to the single platform of posting to just a company website. Our network does provide simultaneous delivery via a patented system. It’s bidirectional and provides an audit trail.

It’s clear that, to most market participants, knowing that they’ve received news simultaneously to others is vital in creating a level playing field for all, whether they access their news via Yahoo! Finance, Bloomberg, the company’s web site or any of thousands of other sources they may already be using that receive Business Wire’s feed.

Thanks,
Tom Becktold
SVP, Marketing
Business Wire