By Flora Haslam
The NLA’s plan to extend its licensing remit to cover newspaper websites has, unsurprisingly, been met with widespread condemnation from the PR community.
It’s all very well for the NLA to want to ‘protect the rights of publishers’ – let’s be honest, they could do with all the help they can get in the current climate, but I thought the rationale for the NLA was to compensate publishers for loss of sales? I really don’t see how charging for clippings of online news stories (which are freely available) can possibly be justified?
The debate on monetising internet content could rage forever, but while some – notably the FT – have gone down the subscription route, and other publishers have toyed with pay per page view, the fact remains that the vast majority of UK online news is available free of charge.
I still struggle to understand the basic argument that the NLA fee compensates lost revenue. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve always found that when a client gets in the Telegraph or the Guardian, they’re usually very keen to go and buy themselves a copy – sometimes more than one! So you could argue the PR industry is actually responsible for driving newspaper sales (and that’s before we even get started on the arguments that some copy is actually created by PRs and their clients anyway).
Extending the charges to cover web content just seems like a step too far. The NLA’s own research shows that 23% of newspapers’ online content never appears in print which, by my reckoning, means we’ll all be paying twice for 77% of coverage... nice work if you can get it.
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