"NewsPrompt is an easy-to-use, inexpensive means of tracking fast-breaking news and complete stories that affect a company, its competitors, partners, and entire industries, as they are available," said Dave Armon, chief operating officer, PR Newswire. NewsPrompt "gives public relations and investor relations officers a powerful monitoring tool so they have the opportunity to hear about potentially market-moving developments as they are broadcast and can be better prepared to brief the CEO and CFO," according to Armon. Steven Fadem, president and CEO of Relegence Corp., confirmed that Relegence's marketing focus would remain targeted at the financial services area.

Sources include news feeds from 63 news wire services, including the Financial Times, many foreign wires, and PR Newswire itself; plus two regulatory sources (the Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR filings and the London Stock Exchange's RNS); and two television channels (Bloomberg TV and CNBC). In addition to the feeds, the service monitors some 5,000 Web sites that cover news from the international stock exchanges, key U.S. and foreign governmental sites, international news sites (e.g., Fox, The Washington Post, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, etc.), business media (e.g., Barrons, Reuters.com, Wall St. Journal's U.S., Europe, and Asia editions); and online newspapers and trade publications. It also covers thousands of corporate sites including the companies in the S&P 500, Russell 3,000, and European companies.

Keywords can include subject terms, company names, stock symbols, etc. The system allows phrase searching. A "relevancy meter" allows users to limit search results. Users can choose to view articles by subject, event, or news source, and with time sequence (last-in-first-off the default but options to change the order, e.g., first-in-first-off). For television station output, the system supplies a Windows Media Player to open automatically for viewing live coverage. Users can also e-mail summary reports to both subscribers and non-subscribers to NewsPrompt.

Ted Skinner, media intelligence product specialist for PR Newswire, explained that the product works more like an application than a toolbar. Users can run it automatically on start-up or activate it on command or even set time and content requirements for alerts. The system is definitely a current awareness tool, according to Skinner. Usually it will only keep clips available for scrolling back for a couple of weeks—no permanent archive. Skinner said that the system will "keep search terms attached to user names and passwords, so people can use the system when they work at home." It also allows Boolean searching, phrase making, and so forth. Users can also create story clusters or subfolders. Within those clusters the system will compare stories and group them to save users from reading the same story over and over.

PR Newswire already has an eWatch service that monitors wires, Web news sources, etc., but with less focus on financial information. Skinner says that users who buy both services from PR Newswire will get a 10 percent discount. PR Newswires' NewsPrompt service costs $2,950 per seat for one to four users; five to nine seats cost $2,750 per seat; at 10 users the price goes down to $2,500 a seat. In contrast, eWatch has a five-seat minimum. In greater contrast, Relegence has a 20-seat minimum.

Users who want NewsPrompt to add sources might have a hard time pushing Relegence to expand. Fadem admitted that though they were constantly expanding coverage, a request from someone with only two seats "probably wouldn't have enough clout." On the other hand, if a partner like PR Newswire—representing NewsPrompt users—"approached us then we would work with them. It's a very good relationship which we look to expand over the coming year. If we had an opportunity to help that relationship, we're all for it."