Cision is the dominant PR software platform — PR Newswire, Brandwatch, CisionOne. Owned by Platinum Equity since 2020. Vocus, PRWeb, and HARO inside the lineage.
The press release isn't dead. The unified PR platform is. Why teams running unbundled best-in-class stacks outperform teams that bought into Cision, Meltwater, or Onclusive's end-to-end pitch.
Most enterprise communications teams are running a stack that grew by accumulation, not design. Wire, media databases, monitoring, influencer platforms, analytics dashboards. The discipline is simplification — what to cut, what to keep, and where to reinvest the saved budget.
A March 2013 note on Peter Shankman's departure from Vocus, three years after he sold HARO to the firm. The exit ended Shankman's day-to-day involvement with the press-source connection system he built in 2008.
Viralheat: predictive social analytics pioneer, founded 2011 by Raj Kadam and Vishal Sankhla, acquired by Cision March 2015. The technology became CisionOne.
Peter Shankman built Help A Reporter Out (HARO) in 2008 — the single piece of infrastructure that connected the global press to the world's sources for sixteen years. Cision shut it down in 2024. Nothing has replaced it at the same scale.