NewsRight, a licensing organization for news organizations like the New York Times and Associated Press, has made its first deal, agreeing to sell its members' stories and data about those stories to Moreover Technologies.
Moreover is a news aggregator that charges companies – both small and multinational — to get access to stories and data packaged specifically to the company’s interests. For example, an oil company will pay to receive a wide range of reporting on oil and gas.
Prior to this deal, Moreover was not paying for most of that content nor was it getting any analytics. Now it will pay NewsRight to ensure it gets every story it needs from up to 1,000 news organizations, as well as said analytics.
“This is new,” David Westin, CEO of NewsRight, told TheWrap. “We haven’t seen this sort of multi-sourced license that includes data across this wide a spectrum.”
“Our relationship with one aggregator won’t make a difference, but if we can replicate it with others it will make a difference.”
The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Westin said it was for more than one year and that money will vary based on how much content and data Moreover requests.
"Moreover Technologies is thrilled to parnter with NewsRight to provide our clients the timely and original news reports licensed from a broad set of digital publications," Moreover President Paul Farrell said in a statement.
NewsRight, initially founded by the Associated Press as the News Licensing Group, relaunched in January with 29 founding members such as the Times, AP and Post. On top of those founders, it has hundreds of other organizations signed up to license their work and provide data.
Also Read: New York Times, Washington Post, AP Found NewsRight
Its goal is to establish an additional revenue stream for newspapers for their digital content and to convince these large-scale business-to-business aggregators to recognize the need to pay for this content.
It has been in negotiations with Moreover for almost a year and has spent the past several months trying to convince similar aggregators to sign up for its service.
“We already have had some significant expression of interest from some other aggregators and have begun negotiations with some of them,” Westin said. “The hope is as we do more of them, they will get easier. We’ve worked through all the legal and business issues.”
At first, Westin said the hard part was settling all of those issues with NewsRight’s members, who all have different approaches to their digital content. Now, the focus is on these potential partners.