Categories: OLD Media Moves

Morningstar drops service used by business journalists

Talking Biz News received the following email earlier this week from a business reporter:

We have an $800/year subscription to a Morningstar product that allows us to set an alert for all SEC filings made by Oregon companies. Morningstar is eliminating the product and steering folks to Intelligize, which costs $3,500/year.
That’s out of our price range. Do you know of any other cheap ways to set a geographic alert for SEC filings? It’s easy to set up SEC alerts through free sites for known companies. But we have a lot of startups and real estate LLCs that file documents with the SEC. If we don’t know the name of the startup or LLC, we can’t set an alert for it.
We can manually search filings twice a day, but that’s a waste of time in the long run.
So we asked Morningstar what was going on. Here is the reply we received:

To answer your question, we made the decision to retire the Morningstar Document Research (MDR) web-based service because we are simplifying and streamlining our product lineup and focusing on other areas. The primary users of MDR are law firms and accounting firms, clients who typically do not use other Morningstar offerings.

For your reference, we’re not retiring the MDR API, a service that delivers SEC and EDGAR filings through an API rather than through MDR’s web-based platform.

We recommended to the business reporter that he check out SECFilings.com, but he noted that its alert service doesn’t allow geographic searches of SEC documents.

Is there anything else that has a filings alert system used to track filings by geography? If so, please post a comment.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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