Cision Plans Purchase of PR Newswire

Cision has announced a new agreement to purchase PR Newswire, a company well-known for publishing reams of press releases daily. The move is set to turn Cision into a major figure in communications services and software, and though the move needs to pass some regulatory hurdles, it is still set to close by the end of 2016's first quarter.

PR Newswire counts over 30,000 customers to its credit, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 2000 firms and even some government agencies. The company delivers the releases from those organizations to a huge body of journalists and other writers worldwide as a means to make sourcing that much easier for stories.

Cision's move to add PR Newswire to its own roster, meanwhile, should have significant benefit within the company, particularly as it relates to Cision's Help A Reporter Out (HARO) solution. HARO provides writers with a database of experts, along with over 14,000 public relations staffers, to get more access to insights about the news.

Cision's CEO, Peter Granat, commented “Bringing Cision and PR Newswire together will enable communicators to turn data into actionable insights — the necessary link between communications and business outcomes. We are serious about building a comprehensive platform to help our clients manage the entire lifecycle of communications – from influencer discovery and content distribution to engagement and campaign analysis.”

Granat raises an excellent point here; having information is great, but its value is limited unless the information is actually put to use. Being able to act on information is information's truest value, and that means the information needs to be organized, interpreted, and correctly placed. That's why Cision's move to bring in PR Newswire makes so much sense; the company already has the apparatus in place to interpret and disseminate information. Now what it needs is a big stock of fodder, and PR Newswire gets fresh fodder in every day. PR Newswire, meanwhile, gets to put that material into more hands, which makes it more valuable by extension. This combination should prove to be a very potent one.

The exact terms of the deal weren't mentioned, but several institutions—Barclays, Deutsche Bank Securities and RBC Capital Markets—are all slated to provide debt financing to Cision, suggesting a cash component.