You are referring to our product Clipsearch, which is available to agencies and end users. No plans have been abandoned. You can find out more here: http://www.clipsearch.co.uk/

The PRCA tweeted that the NLA “wouldn’t indicate planned pricings”. We’d like to make clear that we have been transparent on price – price lists and a cost calculator are available on our site: http://www.nla-web.com.

Thanks for the offer of breakfast. The NLA would be happy to attend, as we have been happy to attend other meetings with stakeholders.

Here are a couple of factual points in response to your post:

1) We have been speaking to the PR industry through ‘traditional’ channels like PR Week and membership bodies; but we have also made a sincere effort to engage – online – with bloggers and have commented on many posts (for example, the PR Bristol blog you cite).
2) We don’t agree with your description of the paid-for monitoring market as ‘an open network’. Services like Meltwater or Moreover often charge thousands of pounds to monitor the news for their clients without – at the moment – paying any fair fee to the owners of this content. Clients subscribe to theses services because they deliver tailored and sifted web content – which is very different to logging on to a newspaper’s website and reading it yourself.
3) On eClips Web – this service is designed, with a great deal of industry input, to help media monitoring agencies, so is probably not that relevant to other users. In effect, it is an XML feed coming direct from newspapers’ content management systems, metadata included. It is intended as a superior alternative to web-scraping for media monitoring agencies to use – which will enable them to provide an improved service to their clients.

We’ve put up all this and lots of other information on our site: http://www.nla-web.com.

“Pugh is seeking to protect the revenues of newspaper publishers. It’s a laudable objective, but attempting to overlay a licensing model on an open network makes no sense whatsoever.”

I wonder if he’ll come to lunch?

Also, the NLA explanations don’t stack up for me, especially about the local authority usage (half of our local rag is made up of valuable community info from the council) and the fact that, in my mind at least, PR’s drive extra traffic to newspaper sites that they would not normally get. This comes not only in the form of existing clients but because the majority of us use a size 5 trumpet to shout about our coverage successes in pitches and in e-dialogue with potential, new and existing clients.