NLA | Wadds' PR Blog

July 7th, 2010 by Wadds

Media monitoring beyond the paywall

PR agencies and brands needing to see what has been written about them on national newspaper web sites face a quieter couple of months given the new News International paywall and The Financial Times (FT) digital archive.

Content from News International titles has been withdrawn from media monitoring agencies and aggregator services and won’t be available until the launch of the Newspaper Licensing Authority’s (NLA) eClips platform, expected sometime in September.

NLA channel partners such as Cision, Durrants and Precise will provide their clients with News International content via the eClips platform as part of their monitoring services.

Meanwhile, the FT has pulled out of the NLA scheme and has launched its own digital searchable archive. In future media monitoring agencies and their customers will need to purchase a licence direct from the FT once their current NLA licence expires.

Is this the thin end of the wedge for the demise of the ‘pay once and you’re protected’ approach to media copyright management?

“The FT has been developing a direct licensing philosophy for some time. [It] wants a direct customer relationship, so that whilst the channel (aggregator or press clipping agency) may charge for its service, only the FT can charge for its content,” said David Pugh, CEO of the NLA.

“Collective licensing is valuable for publishers and clients alike – but the FT feels that it has a unique position as a global brand with niche content and expertise – and their view is that this is best managed by them directly,” he added.

Posted in Business, Media, PR
Tags: Cision, Durrants, Financial Times, News International, Newspaper Licensing Agency, NLA, Precise
6 Comments »

May 24th, 2010 by Wadds

NLA seeks High Court ruling on Meltwater challenge to web licensing

The NLA has played a bold stroke in its ongoing scrap with web aggregator Meltwater. It announced today that it will ask the High Court to rule on Meltwater’s opposition to the scheme.

NLA managing director David Pugh says that he wants to clear the matter up at the earliest opportunity rather than waiting for a judgment from the Copyright Commission in February 2011.

“We believe that clarity on all aspects of our web licences needs to be achieved as quickly and unambiguously as possible. The Copyright Tribunal will rule on the commercial aspects of NLA web licensing […] but the High Court is the proper place to decide on the legality of our web licences,” said Pugh.

We’ve followed this issue at Speed for the past year and whenever I hear of mates in the media losing their jobs I return to the issue.

We’ve been fooled into thinking that online content is free by the NLA’s newspaper publisher members.

Up until recently these publishers have been willing to give away editorial content online for free in a bid to secure traffic around which they could build advertising revenues. It’s a model that failed in all but a few exception circumstances.

We almost certainly won’t be having this argument in five or ten years time because by then publishers will either have gone bust or will have established robust financial models and mechanisms for protecting their content.

But for now the question remains. If business-to-business aggregators and press clipping agencies are generating an income from original content produced by a newspaper either in print or online shouldn’t they make a contribution to the original source?

We can argue over whether the NLA’s model is appropriate and how it should be applied throughout the PR supply chain but at its core the NLA is seeking to ensure that its members receive a contribution from anyone that generates income from the after market for their content.

It’s true that the income that is generated won’t prop up the ailing newspaper industry but the principle at stake is one of fairness. If you reuse or repurpose my content commercially I want a share of the action.

The NLA remains insistent that Google as a consumer-facing service is not part of this debate and that its members have their own direct deals in place with the search giant.

I struggle with this argument and am sure that it’s this issue that Meltwater will challenge if it can afford to pursue the case via the High Court. Google Alerts and Google News are almost certainly the most widely used frontline monitoring tools by agencies and brands in the UK and US.

Posted in Media, PR
Tags: Copyright Tribunal, High Court, Meltwater, Newspaper Licensing Agency, NLA
7 Comments »

March 28th, 2010 by Wadds

NLA web licensing won’t make a dent in online losses for newspaper industry

Revenues from the Newspaper Licensing Authority’s (NLA) web licensing scheme will make little impact on the losses being racked up by newspaper publishers online.

The NLA’s own estimates put annual revenues for the scheme at £2 million. Meanwhile, the Guardian alone is reportedly losing £36m per year, or £100,000 per day.

Under the NLA’s leadership the newspaper publishing industry believes that it should benefit from any income generated by third-parties that sell products or services based on content generated by NLA members.

The Financial Times and The Times have opted out of the scheme and plan to implement their own independent licensing models.

The NLA scheme has seen aggregators, clipping agencies and PR firms subject to a levy from the start of the year. But the NLA isn’t charging Google claiming that it is aiming its scheme solely at business-to-business users.

The PR industry body PRCA and clipping agency Meltwater are challenging the NLA’s scheme via the UK Copyright Tribunal with the claim that effectively charging from links is an affront to democracy and the openness of the web.

Posted in Media
Tags: Financial Times, Newspaper, Newspaper Licensing Agency, NLA, The Times
6 Comments »

March 17th, 2010 by Wadds

Reputation Online on Times Online blocks

Vikki Chowney was kind enough to ask me for my thoughts on the news yesterday that Times Online has blocked Meltwater from spidering its site for her latest article on Reputation Online - Meltwater in a tizz over Times block, but does really anyone care?

Here’s my interview with Vikki in full.

The action by The Times to block News Now and now Meltwater is another example of a publishers setting out the battlelines in the fight to challenge the business model of aggregators and online clipping agency. The move will inevitably hurt Meltwater. Clients rely on it to provide a comprehensive service and a fragmented monitoring service isn’t helpful if you are charged with managing the reputation of a business.

But it’s odd that The Times is taking this direct action against Meltwater and News Now yet News International is not exercising the NLA’s new web clipping license despite being an NLA member. It shows the ongoing turmoil in publishing industry and it attempts to shift from print to online.

The publishing industry is in real pain as it attempts to monetise its content online. Ad revenues have collapsed and circulation figures are down. Publishers are seeking to create new business models around their content online and believe that third parties that generate income from aggregating and monitoring their content should share the income they generate.

Attitudes will change over the next 18 months as newspaper publishers raise paywalls in front of their sites – and news articles are replaced by summaries in Google News searches.

Posted in Business, Media, PR
Tags: Google News, News International, Newspaper, Newspaper Licensing Agency, NLA, Publishing, Times
3 Comments »

January 22nd, 2010 by Wadds

NLA vs Meltwater: “come and have a go [...] but make sure you have the requisite authority to make your point in court”

Steve has posted an update on the NLA vs Meltwater tribunal after the NLA issued a statement yesterday and he caught up with its commercial director Andrew Hughes.

“The NLA says Meltwater’s approach to the digital licence issue is unfair. Meltwater is saying bollocks, we’ll challenge the legality and appropriateness of this. The NLA is now saying come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough, but please make sure you have the requisite authority to make your point in court.”

“It’s not going to make EastEnders scriptwriters weak at the knees, but it’s a fair debate and one that needs to be had. And one I look forward to hearing it.”

Posted in Media, PR
Tags: "web licensing", Meltwater, NLA
1 Comment »

January 11th, 2010 by Wadds

Meltwater’s Copyright Tribunal claim vs the NLA considered

The PR industry is celebrating the NLA’s “climb down” last week over its web licensing scheme. The move followed Meltwater’s challenge of the scheme via the UK Copyright Tribunal.

The NLA said last week that it was suspending invoicing until the Copyright Tribunal reports its findings. In its submission Meltwater has asked the Tribunal to refund any fees if its claim proved successful.

“We’re delighted that the NLA has decided to suspend invoicing for its ill-considered new web licence pending the outcome of a Copyright Tribunal brought about by Meltwater,” said Kevin Taylor, Past President, CIPR in a statement.

But celebrations could be premature as the PRCA’s director general Francis Ingham recognises.

“[…] The NLA say they’ll retrospectively bill users if the Tribunal happens to rule in their favour. I think they’ll lose the case, but even if they were to win, I am extremely doubtful they would find it easy to back-date bills – I know they’d like to be a wing of the Revenue, but they’re not.”

Steve Earl has waded through Meltwater’s 30-page submission to the Copyright Tribunal. He studied media law and has considered the arguments in a post on his blog. It’s well worth a read.

He believes that the Meltwater claim rests on three points:

the information that Meltwater provides to its customers is “a necessary step in the act of receiving a literary work”
Meltwater “signposts” news that breaks online. Any copyright obligations are between the publisher and the end-user
URLs are not intellectual property and cannot be considered part of a copyrighted literary work

Meltwater has asked the Copyright Tribunal to rule that end-users who receive its aggregated lists of breaking online news stories are not breaking copyright law in any way.

In a comment on this blog last week Durrant’s managing director Jeremy Thompson said:

“Meltwater are challenging the NLA’s right to licence hyperlinking which they believe is against the spirit of the internet. They tried something similar in Scandinavia and failed.”

The Copyright Tribunal could take up to 12 months to adjudicate on the case. In the meantime the PR industry is celebrating last week’s announcement by the NLA as an early victory.

Francis Ingham has the last word.

“The fundamental point is this though. If they were confident of their position, they wouldn’t have blinked. But they have. And in our view, it’s because their bluff’s been called,” he said.

Posted in Business, Media, PR
Tags: "web licensing", CIPR, Meltwater, NLA, PRCA
4 Comments »

January 7th, 2010 by Wadds

NLA suspends invoicing for web licensing costs; advises end users to make accruals

The Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) has written to end users of paid-for newspaper web monitoring services today in a bid to qualify the status of its newspaper web licensing scheme. The move follows Meltwater’s challenge of the scheme via the UK Copyright Tribunal – a process which could take up to 12 months.

In a statement (PDF) the NLA says that licensing scheme is effective from 1 January 2010 but that it is suspending invoicing until the Copyright Tribunal has ruled on the Meltwater claim. The NLA says that the vast majority of press cuttings agencies and aggregating services have agreed to the new licensing structure and are now licensed and that Meltwater is the exception.

“We are [suspending invoicing] out of respect for the Tribunal process and to ensure that the clients of media monitoring agencies that have signed licences are not disadvantaged in the period between now and when the Copyright Tribunal delivers its verdict,” said the NLA’s managing director, David Pugh.

The NLA is advising end-users of paid-for newspaper web monitoring services to accrue for web licensing costs ahead of the Copyright Tribunal returning its verdict.

Posted in Media, PR
Tags: "web licensing", Meltwater, NLA
11 Comments »

January 5th, 2010 by Wadds

Q&A with Meltwater and NewsNow on NLA web licensing scheme

Both Meltwater and NewsNow are standing firm in their opposition to the NLA web licensing scheme.

Meltwater has referred the issue to the UK Copyright Tribunal while NewsNow has reluctantly removed links to NLA member sites from its’ paid for products. Both have signed up to the Right2Link campaign.

In a statement on its web site the NLA says, “While we respect their right to take this action, we are confident that the Copyright Tribunal will recognise that the NLA’s approach has been measured and reasonable.”

The CIPR and PRCA both remain opposed to the scheme. The PRCA has publically applauded Meltwater and has said that it is giving “serious thought” as to how it should respond.

I caught up with Struan Bartlett, Chief Executive, NewsNow and Jorn Lyseggen, CEO, Meltwater at the end of last year to better understand their opposition to the NLA scheme.

Q. What’s the difference between charging for links and providing a service whereby links are aggregated and served to customer on a paid-for basis?

NewsNow: […] The Right2Link campaign is about protecting the right to link. That’s not the same thing as saying that you can never charge for access to a service that contains links to other sites – if you did that any news site with a paywall like FT.com or WSJ would soon be out of business. The right to link means not needing permission from or being charged by the linked-to website. NewsNow’s paid-for services are no different to FT.com’s or WSJ’s in the respect that they will all contain links to relevant third-party websites. NewsNow demands the same journalistic freedoms that news outlets demand for themselves.

Meltwater: If a source has a pay wall we only spider and index the source subject to an agreement with the source. It is usually an arrangement where we are allowed to index, and when a client clicks on a link to an article from this source he ends up at the subscription/log in page of the source. We basically market the content behind the pay wall, and our clients will not get access to the content unless they are a subscriber with the source.

Q. How will you adapt your service to respond to pay walls?

NewsNow: We already link to many websites that employ pay walls. We link to them exactly the same way as free-to-access web sites.

Meltwater: We have agreements in place with a substantial numbers of subscriber sources, including the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Q. Have you calculated the gross cost to your business of paying the NLA its proposed dues under the web licensing scheme?

Meltwater: The cost of the NLA license directly billed to Meltwater is £10,000. The cost the NLA wants us to enforce on our customers amounts to about £1,000,000.

NewsNow: We have and it’s not just the immediate costs of the license but the indirect costs on us of policing their scheme and the downstream uncertainty over costs and continued availability of publications in the scheme. The license purports to offer aggregators certainty but it doesn’t. In its current form it doesn’t offer any certainty whatsoever.

Q. Is the NLA eClips database a threat to your business?

Meltwater: The license terms of the alleged NLA license states that we are to disclose all client data to NLA. On the other hand NLA reserves the right to, at any time, to make the decision to directly compete with Meltwater selling their eClips Web feed directly to our clients. Meltwater welcomes all competition, also from the NLA, but then it has to be on a level playing field. We are not willing to disclose all our client data to a potential competitor.

NewsNow: The NLA hasn’t provided any guarantees that it won’t compete. There is a fundamental conflict of interest where a collective licensing body – that is insisting you give it your customer list – can’t guarantee it won’t be providing services in the market. Various clauses of the NLA licence already provide the NLA with advantages it could use to unfairly undermine industry members’ competitive positions, while providing the veneer of plausible deniability.

Posted in Business, Media, PR
Tags: "web licensing", Meltwater, NewsNow, NLA
5 Comments »

December 17th, 2009 by Wadds

Meltwater to challenge NLA web licensing via UK Copyright Tribunal

Meltwater customers received an email this morning in which Meltwater says that it is challenging the NLA web licensing scheme via the UK Copyright Tribunal. This is likely to take as long as 12 months during which Meltwater says that it will continue to serve links to its business-to-business customers.

The full text of the email follows below:

Dear Meltwater Customer,

You may or may not be aware that the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) recently decided to extend its hardcopy licensing regime to cover links to newspaper website content. The NLA believes that you (our customer) need a license from the NLA in order to click on the links you receive from the Meltwater News Service. Meltwater strongly disagrees with this and has announced today that we are taking the NLA to the UK Copyright Tribunal to challenge what we consider to be a “link tax” without legal basis.

The NLA, originally formed in 1996, was created to license and collect revenue from the copying and clipping of print media. Now the agency is attempting to enforce licensing agreements on Internet links. The NLA is targeting both companies providing media monitoring services and the customers subscribing to such services.

Meltwater is pursuing this legal action after the NLA threatened to sue any online media monitoring company who fails to sign up to its new content licensing agreement by January 1. 2010. We have been in good faith discussions with the NLA for several months now, but have been unable to come to an agreement. While Meltwater respects the copyright of the NLA’s members, the licensing scheme seeks to control the receipt of links to freely published online content, even though such rights are not granted to copyright owners under UK copyright law. Therefore, Meltwater has decided to take this matter to the UK Copyright Tribunal because we believe that the NLA’s licensing scheme has no basis in UK copyright law.

It may take 9 to 12 months for the Tribunal to come to its decision. In this period, Meltwater will continue to serve you with links to relevant news stories and we will continue to do our very best to meet your needs.

For more information regarding this issue, please refer to our press release and the FAQ in the attached PDF.

If you have any questions regarding Meltwater’s challenge to the NLA’s unreasonable licensing scheme, please feel free to contact me at jorunn.ekestad@meltwater.com.

Thank you for your understanding and continued support.

Kind Regards

Jorunn Ekestad

Director Client Relations UK

jorunn.ekestad@meltwater.com

Posted in Business, Media, PR
Tags: Meltwater, NLA
4 Comments »

December 8th, 2009 by Wadds

David Phillips: Will newspapers credit online communities?

David Phillips is an author, lecturer and agency PR man. If you haven’t read the book he co-wrote with Sunderland University’s Philip Young called Online Public Relations then shame on you.

Phillips has brought a fresh perspective to the NLA debate by challenging the ownership of original content. It’s a debate that Phillips has supported with a real time case study.

“I went to this page in The Times, analysed it to get the semantic concepts. Looked for those concepts in Bing.com and found that loads of other people and publication wrote this story in similar terms long before The Times.”

“When The Times vanishes behind its firewall will this mean that it will pay all the other sites for the news it plagiarises from them as well as suing all the sites that use the same story after they publish offline or behind the firewall?”

“Who, then is going to set up the counter organisation to the NLA to get their money back from newspapers who borrow/plagiarise content from the online community?” asks Phillips.

Its Flat Earth News revisited. Phillips works from the premise that very little is original. And so we very quickly get into a debate about how original content is created and how you credit the originator and the organisations that circulate a story.

Posted in Business, Media, PR
Tags: David Phillips, Newspaper Licensing Agency, NLA, Philip Young, PR, Sunderland University
2 Comments »

December 8th, 2009 by Wadds

CIPR and PRCA stand firm in opposition to NLA web licence

The PR industry trade associations are standing firm on the issue of business-to-business web licensing. Here’s reaction from the CIPR and PRCA on news that the NLA’s licensing scheme will go ahead in the New Year.

“I can think of no other organisation that would charge you for improving the lifeblood of their business. Member schemes usually involve a reward, not a fee. […] I find it hard to accept that my members should pay fees for increasing the readership of content that is available free of charge.”
Kevin Taylor, President, CIPR

“[Our] position hasn’t changed. For so long as content is freely available, I think this is an unfair and legally un-enforceable charge.”
Francis Ingham, Director General, PRCA

Posted in Business, Media, PR
Tags: Chartered Institute of Public Relations, CIPR, Newspaper Licensing Agency, NLA, PRCA
2 Comments »

December 3rd, 2009 by Wadds

NLA web clipping licence to go ahead; “small number of paid web aggregators” yet to sign up

I have followed the NLA’s plan to licence the use of paid-for business-to-business web content from newspaper web sites since the NLA announced its plans in June (search my blog for content tagged NLA for more information). Since then publishers have started to raise pay walls and take on Google in a bid to monitise content.

Six months is a long time on the Internet and especially so for newspaper publishers running loss making web operations.

The NLA said today that the web licensing scheme will go ahead from 1 January 2010. Press clipping agencies, web aggregators, PR agencies and client organisations that track web clippings on newspaper web sites will need a licence. Free consumer services will not be affected.

In September the NLA said that the move will generate an estimated £2 million and while this won’t make a significant dent in the £1 billion production budget of the UK newspaper industry, it will ensure that publishers recover a contribution from the after market for web clippings.

In a press release issued today the NLA said that it has reached agreement with almost all press cutting agencies but that it still needed to agree terms with “a small number of paid web aggregators”.

“Newspaper publishers, which own the NLA, have written to the remaining aggregators to express their full support for the NLA’s initiative. The letter makes clear that the publishers and NLA will pursue non-compliant aggregators with technical and/or legal measures as necessary.”

In agency-land any move to implement additional costs will be inevitably be challenged but the ongoing debate about monetising newspaper web content will help the NLA’s case.

The PR industry has responded badly to the NLA web licensing proposals because it has a mindset that content from newspapers web sites is free. And that’s true for now but its starting to change.

We have no way of knowing whether paywalls will work and how newspapers will manage their relationships with search engines. We’re only beginning to see some early indications.

In the meantime the NLA is proceeding with its model to recover revenue for its members.

Posted in Business, Media, PR
Tags: Aggregator, Newspaper, Newspaper Licensing Agency, NLA, Web content
6 Comments »

November 4th, 2009 by Wadds

Q&A with Durrants’ Jeremy Thompson on the Metrica deal, evaluation, aggregators and the NLA

JeremyThompson05 I caught up with Jeremy Thompson this morning, managing director of Durrants, to talk about media monitoring market, PR evaluation, aggregators and the NLA.

Durrants has been on the acquistion trail. It acquired Metrica last week and the UK print monitoring business of Cision UK in July.

The media monitoring sector is oft regarded as the commodity end of the PR industry and is almost certainly under reported – if Durrants was listed in the annual PR Week League tables it would make a top ten slot.

Under Thompson’s leadership Durrants is a £40 million business that is defining the emerging market segment that is media intelligence.

What is the strategic rational for Durrants’ acquisition of Metrica?
The thinking was to bring together the two leading players in the media monitoring and analysis space and deliver the best of both worlds through one integrated platform. The market is beginning to see the upside of integrated services – there are clear benefits of having access to planning data, content and media analysis, all in on place and seamlessly interlinked. And the demand for measurement is stronger than ever as the media world explodes and the need to demonstrate value grows.

How is the deal structured?
Can’t talk about specifics here but we have bought the business and have incentivised management to come with us for the long haul. We plan to run the two side-by-side for a period and integrate when we’ve planned and are ready to go. We’ll move to one platform, one business.

The deal speaks to the opportunity for formal planning and evaluation of PR. Are PR agencies getting smarter?
I’m sure they’re becoming smarter because they are definitely becoming more accountable. End users are all more interested in whether they have achieved a return on their investment and agencies are looking at smarter ways of doing that. And it is not just about column inches any more, it’s about whether they achieved their objectives, be that increased sales or enhanced reputation.

What is Durrants’ competitive response to aggregators?
Aggregators provide a low cost, low value service. They sit somewhere between Google News and media monitors. They can’t match us on service when it comes to complex searching across multiple channels; nor can they deliver in every format from multiple hard copy press packs to viewable BlackBerry clips. And they don’t monitor all channels from print, through TV and radio, to online and social media. We believe what we do adds real value, but we’ll keep listening to our market and adapt if we need to.

Why is the standard of service in the press clipping industry generally so poor? Many press clipping agencies haven’t modernised. Why is this?
What we do is complex. The briefs we work to are extensive and we always aim to find exactly what the customer wants, no more, no less. And everything we do is bespoke to each individual customer. We have invested more than most but occasionally even we get it wrong. I’d like to think that our customer service is first class, and that we go the extra mile to sort problems when they arise.

Do you think there will be further consolidation in the media monitoring and evaluation market?
I’m not sure how much more scope for consolidation there is right now. And if there is, we won’t be doing it; we have enough on our plate with Cision’s UK print monitoring business and Metrica.

The Newspaper Licensing Association: friend or foe?
We recognise publisher rights and we totally understand that we should pay for the commercial re-use of publisher content. To that end, it is useful to be able to deal with a third party rather than to have to go to each publisher direct (we monitor 5,000 print titles in the UK alone). The NLA had a poor reputation historically, but they have worked hard under their current MD, David Pugh, to rectify that. And I think they have made progress, even if they are still not the PR industry’s favorite organisation. They haven’t handled the PR around their online initiative particularly well, and we’re still frustrated by their unwillingness to challenge Google under the same terms that they treat us. But overall, friend right now.

Posted in PR
Tags: Durrants, evaluation, Metrica, Newspaper Licensing Agency, NLA, PR
3 Comments »