What's New at NewsEdge.com?
Jinfo Blog

By Chris Porter

Abstract

Chris Porter looks at how long-established news monitoring and distribution service NewsEdge.com has evolved recently, in response to the changing market for enterprise business news.

Item

Following on from our Q&A with Northern Light, the FreePint Topic Series: News, and Beyond is now taking a fresh look at another very long-standing feature in the news aggregation landscape: NewsEdge.

NewsEdge was established as a company in 1998, though its origins can be traced back well before that, as a flagship product of Desktop Data Inc.

Over its lifetime of more than 20 years, NewsEdge has seen quite a few evolutions and changes of ownership - including a transit in and out of the then Thomson Corporation, which bought it in 2001, then sold it to current owner Acquire Media in 2007.

A spokesman was quoted at the time as saying that Thomson had decided to sell in order to focus on providing legal and financial information, rather than NewsEdge's "broader mission of providing more general corporate news to business customers".

As noted in the recent Series update, the balance between role-specific information applications and general news aggregation services continues to evolve. So how is NewsEdge.com responding to that evolution?

NewsEdge Evolves

FreePint last looked at the service in detail in early 2012. In our new, comprehensively updated review, we note that the vendor has recently made quite a number of enhancements in content and functionality, in response to the ongoing changes in the market for business news alerting services.

In talking to FreePint about its service, Acquire Media staff were keen to emphasise the value of carefully curated source aggregation, in a world of ever-proliferating content: "People are getting more news that they need. The news environment  is such that there are so many sources out competing to get the news out first; people really aren't missing anything if you don't carry absolutely every source," an Acquire Media representative told us.

NewsEdge source coverage has changed significantly since FreePint's last comprehensive review a couple of years back. Its functionality has also moved on, for instance through the strengthening of its administration and help features and the introduction of innovative approaches to news visualisation.

See the new review of NewsEdge.com for full details.

And to keep up with all that is "News, And Beyond" make sure that you have registered for the Series.

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