Interview w/ BW:
emergingcompany.com
emergingcompany.com
(thanks to JSM for finding this)
Tom Becktold—Vice President of Marketing for Business Wire
(partial transcription)
S: If you are in the business of putting out information about companies, these are always of course going to make the companies sound favorable. Is there ever any sort of issue that you know might say XYZ company is doing this and it turns out XYZ company wasn't quite truthful with you or stretched the truth just a little bit too far. What's the... Is that an issue?
TB: Well, to be clear with you, we are not a reporting service. We do not have reporters out there evaluating the news. We work... we have account representatives that build relationships with these companies and the companies issue... We take the full text news releases as written by the company and we issue them on our news... on our service. Of course our newsroom and our staff evaluate companies to make sure that they are legitimate operating organizations and other entities. Beyond that, if a company falsifies a news release that is something that is gonna... they're gonna have to deal with their exchange and the SEC at a certain point. We're very careful if a company inadvertently issues a... makes a mistake on a press release we will quickly issue a correction on behalf of that company, get it into all the database services that we feed into and to the media.
S: So it's not a problem I see...
TB: It really hasn't been a problem. We have very good safeguards to insure that the news releases on our site are from legitimate organizations…
D: Now sometimes you may have... and the reason we want to talk about this is we're really excited to have you on the program... because there are a lot of people who are becoming newly involved in investing and many more of these people of course are doing this on the internet because you know there's such a wealth of information right there on your desktop and invariably they are going to be reading news about companies that have been issued by either the companies themselves, their public relations firm, or perhaps even an investor relations firm, or perhaps even some company or individual has a position in that company, so there's a lot of things that people have to be careful about as the old adage is "if it's in print it must be true" as Skip brought up maybe a company might be less than truthful with you. If you run across a situation where a company perhaps has had a shady little episode do you prohibit them from issuing further news, uh media service... what kind of policing do you have?
TB: We have a very effective policing program and we have had... we really have not had any problems with companies issuing false press releases on our system. Our company goes and meets with the companies that issue our news releases. We meet with them in person or develop relationships with these organizations via telephone. We also have an historical archive of news releases that they may have issued and we monitor any complaints that would come into us, that would be a red flag to follow up on those press releases. We will look at SEC actions if that arises. Generally, again, because the companies are policed by the regulatory agencies -- the SEC, the NASD -- we don't run across companies issuing false press releases via our service. If they do, generally if that were to happen the SEC would take action against that company so it's kind of a policing issue outside of our organization but again we watch for the accuracy of press releases in terms of making sure that the person sending in the news to us is authorized to do that. The press releases themselves obviously there's forward looking statements in it, they should disclose that in their safe harbor statement and whatnot and we often label news releases if they are investment opinion, for example, that that's an opinion and it's not issued by the company they are talking about. So that the investor on the internet would know that a company Wyndham... an investment opinion on Wyndham maybe was generated by a brokerage firm that Wyndham didn't issue that news release because we know we're dealing with a whole new audience where we were five or ten years ago really just communicating with the media and professional investors who understood what a press release was. Now we are dealing with basically anyone who is trading or anyone who has an internet connection.
(...emphasis added...) |
