Late last week, thanks to Reuters I learned that Mergermarket is up for auction. “British publisher Pearson put its Mergermarket news service on the block on Friday[July 26th] while insisting that it intends to hang on to the Financial Times newspaper, Reuters reported.”
Hearing that a beloved information and intelligence source is up for sale stimulates a whole series of questions for law firm intelligence and librarian types, such as:
- Who will buy the service? Obvious choices come to mind like Thomson, Lexis or Bloomberg
- Will (and how) customer service and support be affected?
- Will this get rolled into some other bigger product that I will need to subscribe to for large sums of money to only use a portion of it?
Mergermarket is a good service for all sorts of intelligence projects and likely a profitable business which is why Pearson is looking to sell. One can only hope that come what may for all of its users, that at least the deal will be reported on accurately.