Emerging market news provider opens Web-based Polish agency

by Anna Kocińska

"We're not PAP's or Reuters's full-scale competitors"New-York based Internet Securities Inc. (ISI) last week launched a bilingual, Web-based news service focusing on the Polish market, Internet Securities Businesswire (ISB).
The Warsaw-based operation is the company's first news agency started from scratch. There are no specific plans to begin a similar service in the region, according to Georgi Kadiev, ISB's director.
"First give us three to six months to see how it works and develops," he said. ISB is designed to cover a limited number of business sectors such as telecoms, banking, energy, steel, the copper industry, construction, privatization and insurance.
"Fifty-two percent of our 8,200 customers worldwide … are financial institutions," Kadiev said. "That's why in our news service we will concentrate on macroeconomy, privatization and politics when it impacts the macroeconomy. Whether we include more sectors to our service will depend on what our customers want."
ISB employs a team of six journalists, including Tomasz Oljasz as editor in chief. Prior to joining ISB they all worked for well-known news agencies such as the Polish Press Agency (PAP), Reuters and Interfax. "But we're not PAP's or Reuters's full-scale competitors," Kadiev said. "If we compete, it's in specific sectors where we want to beat them." ISB's daily service contains about 50 news stories of which half are translated into English. "Our goal is to translate them all because most of our customers are not Polish speakers," Kadiev said. To access ISB, subscribers must pay for ISI's entire service but Kadiev said ISB would become a separate product, maybe even on its own Web site. While last week was the service's official launch, ISI has been building it since November.
"First we were trained to run it in-house without access to customers," he said. "On Dec. 1, every customer could see ISB but because most our clients are bankers and they don't have time to look for new things, it took them two months to actually notice this service. After Jan. 1 we are getting really good feedback."
Banks have already started quoting ISB's news in their reports - a first measure of success, he said."I will consider ourselves successful if our subscribers say that they have PAP and Reuters but to have a full picture they need us," he said.
ISB is not now interested in the privatization of PAP, which the previous government talked about selling. "The world markets are not good for news agencies, especially the ones covering only one country," he said. "So if the tender is called now we are not interested. If in six months, let's say we may consider it again."
ISI, established in 1994, has offices in 18 countries and covers business in 35 countries from Central and Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America. It is a Euromoney Institutional Investor company.