NewsCred Blog

There is no question that Chris Ahearn, President of Reuters Media, ‘gets it’. In fact, Reuters as a company seems to understand and evolve smartly with the times. While other media organizations and wire services are struggling with the disruptive nature and innate openness of the web, there are glimmers of hope coming from Reuters. The linked economy, while seen as a threat by some, is embraced by Reuters as an opportunity. Chris is always open to feedback and has solicited ideas and suggestions a number of times, so I hope the following points can help. While Reuters is miles ahead of some of its competition, there is some of room for improvement.

1) During the recent turmoil surrounding the AP’s plans for copyright policing, Chris (@CJAhearn) tweeted: “Reuters stands ready to help those who wish an alternative to the AP.” That’s great, and I think there is a sizable opportunity here to take away business away from the AP. By positioning Reuters as a friendly, more open and flexible company, they are likely to win over a lot of new customers. And by customers, I mean people who pay for full text and images. My company, for example, continues to talk with Reuters about different solutions, and we even recommend Reuters to our own clients. Our talks with other wire services were quite disappointing, even in situations where we wanted to bring them new business.

So I would encourage Chris to really focus on what sets them apart from the traditional wire services and use this opportunity that AP has given them to establish themselves as the superior alternative. In the startup world, we often talk about the freemium model. By embracing fair use, Reuters is doing the same. Giving away a bit of their product for free, in the hope of converting some of these users into full paying clients (for full-text feeds, images, video etc).

2) However, Reuters could improve things internally as well. I quote Chris: “Appropriate excerpting and referencing are not only acceptable, but encouraged.” While Chris talks about openness, embracing links, encouraging fair excerpting etc,  it might be wise for Reuters to take a look at the Terms of Service of their RSS feeds.  It clearly states that commercial ventures cannot use their RSS feeds. Full stop. But the feed only contains a headline and one sentence. If Reuters is serious about fair use (Chris calls it the “do unto others system”, which I love), then they should allow anyone to use the headline and link to them. Not only is it fair use, but could serve as an additional distribution/traffic channel if aggregators and other news sites display their headlines and sent traffic (just check the section marked  Organic Traffic from Google in your analytics!).

3)  iCopyright: When Chris expressed skepticism for AP’s use of iCopyright, Rafat Ali quickly pointed out that Reuters uses the same service. But Chris was very clear: Reuters uses iCopyright for full text article syndication only, whereas AP uses it for excerpts, headlines, and even prices per word. Shocking. So no question that Reuters should absolutely charge for full text content (it’s their business!). But my concern here is pricing. A $500 flat-fee to use an article? It goes up up to $900 if you want to keep the article in your site for longer than 6 months. Perhaps Chris’ “do unto others” philosophy would be good here. Charge based on the size of the client’s site - a small blog or local news site should not be charged the same fee as the New York Times. I know Reuters take into account audience size for their monthly subscriptions, but their per-article feels seem extraordinarily expensive when compared to their monthly fees.

4) How about free full-text articles with ads? If we hypothesize that Reuters is in a better position to monetize content on their site (because of their ad sales team) than a smaller publisher, why not offer a service where full text articles are offered for free but with CPM ads embedded. I noticed an option like this on the iCopyright preview screen, but was unable to select it. It seems like a no brainer if the distribution of the articles comes with Reuters branding, Reuters ads and tracking (perhaps the user can host for a limited time only). Perhaps this ‘free’ option is only extended to smaller publishers or bloggers with the goal of upselling premium services. In the meantime, it helps Reuter’s reputation and brand and will make them the primary choice amongst their competitors.

5) Videos: Reuters videos come with embed codes, but no clear terms of use. Assuming it’s the same terms of use as the RSS feeds, why not open these up? Let anyone embed a video, even commercial publishers. No one can steal or misappropriate video like they do with text. It’s clearly marked Reuters. Stick pre-roll ads on it (seriously, you have a right to do that). But if you put an ad on it, why does it make a difference if it’s seen on your site or elsewhere? You get brand value, ad revenue and distribution. And don’t forget, if I’m embedding Reuters videos regularly, perhaps I’ll shell out money for the paid video feeds without ads. It’s the beauty of the freemium model.

6) Quality Content: nothing has changed here. Regardless of the platform, high quality content will always rule. Pre-internet, there were logistical barriers in getting news to me about the topics I was interested in. If I wanted sports news about my favorite team, but I lived elsewhere, I was often left with no choice but to read the AP’s generic match recap. No emotion, no real time updates, no distinctive voice. But now I have tremendous choice. I can follow my team by reading the local newspaper online, by following real-time updates on Twitter, by getting emotion and passion from blogs. Reuters should remember this, and really focus on diversifying the content in produces. There may still be demand for standard wire copy, but there are opportunities in syndicating their blog content, in producing more real-time content, and adding more color/voice/passion to certain types of reporting (i.e. sports).

7) Chris wants to open up the conversation ‘across party lines’, in public. I cannot support this enough. Unlike the AP’s closed-door meeting a few weeks ago, opening up the dialogue to find a win-win situation is exactly what is needed to solve some of the problems facing news organizations (not all problems are solvable, but luckily Chris doesn’t have to deal with legacy printing presses and truck drivers). My suggestion: do it. Set up a wiki-style site (maybe we’ll get it going?), perhaps organize a one day conference and invite other news agencies, news papers, aggregators, news websites, entrepreneurs and have everyone in the same room. No whining, just real conversations.

Chris’ suggestion to use “do unto others” as the guiding spirit is a great one. We should applaud him, but continue to be constructive in our suggestions and criticisms. In return, it’s only fair that companies who wish to use Reuters content to further their business ensure that their is a reciprocal business benefit to Reuters. This could be license fees for full-text content, linking and sending traffic for headlines, or other forms of partnerships.

Unlike its competitors, Reuters seems ready to listen, so it’s in all our interests to work with them. Thanks Chris.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 12:56 am and is filed under NewsCred. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.