Mirage? M&A drought appears to be ending in PR, marketing space.

After a long drought, M&A is picking up among the service providers relied on by many corporate communications departments and their agencies .

Entrepreneurs seeking funding for their new initiatives are also breathing a sigh of relief that venture capital is again flowing, with the disruptive ad buying network TRAFFIQ getting $10 million in new funding from two firms yesterday.

In the PR space, the perennially loss-making Medialink video news release business was put out of its misery by Shoba Purushothaman’s VC-backed digital video warehousing startup, TheNewsMarket. Medialink needed a new digital business model and TheNewsMarket had to find a way to help its subscribers generate more content, so we’ll see if a merger can be the catalyst for growth.

The place I called home for 20 years, PR Newswire, pulled the trigger on a deal Friday to buy The Fuel Team, the longtime partner behind the PRN “Media Room” and “IR Room products.”  As with the Medialink/NewsMarket, PRN obviously sees the logic in being a repository for its clients’ myriad digital assets  — not simply text press releases.

Another transaction that closed in the past couple of weeks is Techrigy, the social media monitoring company acquired by the fast-growing UK-based marketing automation roll-up Alterian.  Unlike VC-backed competitor Radian6, Techrigy was privately owned and built its business as an OEM solution more than a retail supplier of monitoring.

Who will buy Radian6 and lesser known SM monitors like Crimson Hexagon?  What about legacy VNR producers — like KEF Media Associates and On the Scene Productions – suffering from shrinking demand for glossy, made-for-TV productions?

Another potential acquisition target is Peter Shankman’s advertising-supported ProfNet clone, Help a Reporter, and Feedroom, which suffers from a TheNewsMarket-vs-Brightcove identity complex.

In their quarterly communications with shareholders, the publicly traded PR services firms Cision and Vocus revealed their M&A agenda. Vocus, which hasn’t had a blockbuster acquisition since buying PR Web in 2006, said it would prefer not to use its extra cash for a share buyback.  Rather, CEO Rick Rudman, said he’d target companies that provide one or more of the same services as Vocus, to expand the customer base; or firms that could be added into the Vocus platform to create a new capability; or an organization in an attractive geographic region not currently served  by Vocus.  Cision, on the other hand, is plagued by debt and actively divesting its European media monitoring businesses to concentrate on its software product, CisionPoint.

Other entrenched PR/IR/marcom services players with money to spend include Berkshire Hathaway’s Business Wire; Thomson Reuters; Nasdaq OMX, which owns Globe Newswire and the IR web-hosting service Shareholder.com; and Jorn Lyseggen’s unconventional sales powerhouse Meltwater Group, which recently began selling a social “buzz” product on top of its inaugural media monitoring service.