The Media Committed To Excellence: Acquire Media

"An industry leader in the application of advanced statistical tools across a wide array of media to measure the impact of news for professionals.”

Having an unmatched record for reliability, security and disaster recovery, Acquire Media has been in the business of compiling news and enhancing its value for customers by precisely identifying and tagging organizations, persons, and locations and applying a rigorously maintained industry and subject classification system. Leveraging these assets, Acquire Media is an industry leader in the application of advanced statistical tools across a wide array of media to measure the impact of news for professionals for over 25 years now.

Acquire Media’s technology represents a logical choice when pinpoint filtering, low-latency, and high-availability as the goals. They provide premier real-time news management platforms and APIs under the NewsEdge brand.

The Syndication Suite
Acquire media’s Syndication Suite is a state-of-the-art, real-time content syndication and distribution platform. This product allows digital content publishers and news providers to focus on the quality of their editorial product while it handles all the operational aspects of the electronic content management and delivery. No matter what type of digital media is being published, Syndication Suite can handle it: text, images, audio, video, and more. It also supplies features such as simultaneous delivery to multiple destinations, real-time format transformation by destination, ability to create flexible content micro-channels mixing and matching multiple content sources, normalized metadata across content sources, and comprehensive delivery reporting and monitoring. This tremendous suite allows the content providers to mix and match various content so they can create packages and bundles that can be distributed to the corporations and financial services.

Acquire Media’s inception
The four founders of Acquire Media joined hands in 1991 as a subsidiary of Dow Jones called Investment Dealers’ Digest (IDD). At that time, they formed a real-time financial news processing division within IDD. This division was responsible for internal projects at Dow Jones, including the proof-of-concept for what has become WSJ.com, a custom news portal named “DowVision for the Web”, and “Telerate Interactive News Search” (TINS), the low-latency news search functionality for Telerate’s proprietary paged-based service. As well, the group was responsible for creating and supporting custom news projects for Dow Jones customers in financial services.

In 1998 when Dow Jones decided to sell Telerate, the current management of Acquire Media was invited by Dow Jones to MBO their news division. The newly-formed company (named GSquared) then was sold to a public Nasdaq-listed company Wavephore Corporation (later re-named Wavo).

In 2000, during the collapse of the dot-com stock bubble, Wavo went out of business. It was shortly after this (January 2001) that the management of Acquire Media acquired the assets of their division within Wavo and incorporated it as Acquire Media.

From 2001 to 2007, the company steadily grew revenue making use of a solid and expanding technology base. In 2007, with the help of outside investors, Acquire Media purchased the pioneering and well-known NewsEdge business from Thomson Corporation (now Thompson Reuters).

In 2013, Acquire Media purchased the customer contracts of a smaller competitor, Yellowbrix. This transaction was structured on a revenue share basis, with Acquire Media using excess capacity to service the YellowBrix customers.

At the end of 2015, Acquire Media finalized a transaction to buy out the outside investors remaining from the 2007 NewsEdge transaction with Thomson. Acquire Media is now employee-owned with no outside investors, no debt, and has for several years been cash-flow positive. The company continues to focus on technology-driven current news and related data analytics.

The Client Dimension
Serving the world’s top financial, industrial, and media companies, Acquire Media pockets few sophisticated customers – such as Schwab, Nasdaq, NBC, Tribune Content Agency, and PR Newswire – who appreciate the technological prowess of Acquire Media’s offerings plus the efficiency, speed, resilience and scalability of its news engine.

Meet the Executive Duo

Lawrence C. Rafsky, Chairman and Chief Scientist: Dr. Rafsky, who earned his Ph.D. in statistics from Yale, is a well-known innovator and entrepreneur in the on-line information industry. He has led four successful new ventures, taking overall responsibility for securing funding, setting strategic direction, and building infrastructures. At Automatic Data Processing, from 1978 through 1982, he conceived, planned, negotiated and then served as Managing Director of ECONALYST, the joint venture between ADP and Alan Greenspan’s economic consulting firm, Townsend-Greenspan. In 1982, Dr. Rafsky founded GemNet, a software company. In 1984, Citibank acquired GemNet. Dr. Rafsky served as President of the now re-named FAME Software Corporation. In addition to his entrepreneurial activities, Dr. Rafsky maintains research interests in a number of technical fields.

Brad Scher, CEO: Scher oversees the daily operations which support the information needs of top firms in media, finance, and corporate enterprise, as CEO of Acquire Media. From his beginnings in computer science through his executive role today, Scher leads with an emphasis on technology innovation. Scher’s career began as a technologist at GE Missile and Surface Radar then Memory Technology Incorporated before establishing himself within the information industry. With positions at Investment Dealers’ Digest, a division of Dow Jones, and WavePhore Corporation, he advanced into more strategic business roles that lead to the formation of Acquire Media in 2001. As a founding partner, Scher helped lead the acquisition of WavePhore Lab in 2001 and then NewsEdge from Thomson Corporation in 2007. Through his leadership, Acquire Media has positioned itself as the premier provider of custom digital media delivery and integration solutions.

“Our close relationship with dozens of news providers gives us a unique understanding and perspective on wire and web news, plus their relationship to social media.”