The founder of the Gorkana media database has launched a new service for legal, financial and corporate public relations professionals.
According to the Daily Telegraph, Roxhill Media was set up by Alexander Northcott after a non-compete clause in his contract expired.
I haven’t seen the Roxhill product in action, but with their track record, and technological improvements that have taken place over the last 10 years, I can see this being popular with law firms.
There’s also the issue that a lot of the players in the PR software space have merged or combined in some way, which tends to push up prices, and products lose the spark of their early start-up phase.
You see this time and time over in the legal space when small companies get hoovered up by corporate giants, who then strip the life out of them.
I met Mr. Northcott back in around 2004 when I was an in-house media manager at a City law firm. He pitched Gorkana to the firm, which I think went on to become one of Gorkana’s first customers.
Using the site in its early years, it was incredibly helpful to be able to be able to track what journalists were doing.
Email alerts told you which journos had moved where, and what beats they were covering.
I stopped using Gorkana regularly in 2008 when I left the in-house world, but I’ve used it from time to time since, when working with law firm clients.
Northcott founded Gorkana in 2005 with Michael Webster, and sold the business to the press cutting service Durrants in 2010 for £25 million.
Then in October 2014, US private equity group GTCR acquired the company in a £200 million deal.
Interestingly, GTCR also snapped up two of Gorkana’s rivals, Vocus and Cision in the same year.
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