NewsRight: a Game Changer for Online Journalism?

The Associated Press, The New York Times Co., The Washington Post Co. and several other news organizations banded together Thursday to launch a new company called NewsRight. Its goal: let news orgs see how widely their original reporting is being spread, and let them easily license content to interested partners.

Following three years of planning, NewsRight’s industry reach is already substantial. It has 29 co-investors and 30 additional participating companies, representing more than 800 web sites of U.S. newspapers.

David Westin, former ABC News president and NewsRight’s founding CEO, hopes the company will help sustain original content production. NewsRight’s News Registry platform tracks websites, blogs and other Internet aggregators to measure the spread of its participants’ content.

“NewsRight is designed to address an issue in the marketplace of an increased appetite for news but some real challenges to supply,” Westin told Mashable. “There is a flaw in the business model right now. Value is not going to those who pay, and we want to correct the imbalance.”

The company provides publishers with strings of HTML code to insert in their stories’ headlines and text, so they can track the spread of each piece of their content. The encoded stories report to the registry, showing where and when a story is reblogged and read.

Source : http://mashable.com