Bulletin photo by Angel Feliciano

NewsRight aims to regain
control of news content

By Libby Leyden-Sussler
Bulletin Correspondent

Will journalism be able to survive the shift into Generation 2.0?

NewsRight could be “a key steppingstone to the evolution of the news industry,” according to Srinandan Kasi, executive vice president and chief operating officer for NewsRight.

Kasi presented the company’s ideas and goals to 30 people Friday, Feb. 10, at the New England Newspaper and Press Association’s winter convention in the Boston Park Plaza Hotel.

NewsRight, which has offices in New York City and San Francisco, is an online news registry and licensing service primarily intended to help those who use it to track, then license, their content to websites and news services.

The mission of NewsRight is “to build a new business model to sustain journalism in the digital age,” Kasi said.

NewsRight, formed in the summer of 2011, is financially backed by 29 news outlets, including The New York Times and The Washington Post.

NewsRight encodes stories with hidden data to track the spread of the content. The encoded stories then report back to the registry to show where and how the story is being used.

With the rise in citizen journalism and the introduction of blogs, tweets and other social networking, information from news sites is being taken with no payment being made for use of the content and is seen by up to millions with little or no credit being provided to the original source of the content.

Kasi said that, with the launch of NewsRight, he hopes to help connect the broken business model in the news industry. NewsRight does not tell its publishing partners what to do with the information they receive about where their stories are being used. Publications can choose whether they wish to: do nothing, on the premise that their content’s aggregation promotes their brand; seek licensing fees individually; or join with other participants to obtain licensing through NewsRight.

NewsRight is made up of 14 board members and is a partnership with The Associated Press. David Westin, former head of ABC News, was named its first chief executive officer.

Kasi showed PowerPoint slides of the NewsRight software and highlighted its user-friendly format. A graph is made with data, showing where each story is going and what the story is being used for, whether it’s for commercial or personal use. Kasi said he hopes to partner with larger search engines such as Google to help track down sites that are taking copyrighted information and using it for their own profit.

Kasi concluded by showing how to get an account through the website www.newsright.com. Kasi said a company or personal user wishing to begin using NewsRight must submit a request on the site’s contact page. He said NewsRight doesn’t begin to make money until the user makes money first.

“NewsRight provides authorized access to the best original reporting and related analytics for convenient use across digital platforms,” Kasi said.

Libby Leyden-Sussler is an undergraduate student in the Northeastern University School of Journalism.

POSTED 3/25/12