CCC/Newstex Agreement Affirms Role of Blog Content
Important Details: This week, the Copyright Clearance Center, with a strong reach into both enterprise and academic areas for the re-use and sharing of news content, announced that it is adding something new to its extensive database of licensable content: blogs. CCC will license about 1000 news-oriented blogs from Newstex, making them available to its corporate and academic customers. That means that knowledge workers in those areas will now be able to search and browse blog material alongside traditional news content.
“What we’ve heard from some customers is a generalized interest in other content types: blogs, wikis, video, photos and other images, music . . . you name it,” says Bill Burger, vp/marketing at CCC. “So we decided to move on the blog front first because it’s largely text-based, which is what most people look to us for today, and because Newstex provided us with an efficient way to get the ball rolling. The Newstex arrangement works well for us in that they can and will handle the royalty payments to the bloggers.”
Newstex, a relatively recent entrant into the business of news aggregation, has been the first to develop the blog niche and now has relationships with LexisNexis and EBSCO, as well as CCC. Newstex has steadily built its base of newsy blogs, finding that those in business, public affairs and politics are of greatest demand. In early November, Newstex CEO Larry Schwartz spoke at a session of the recent Blog World expo in Las Vegas. An interview with Schwartz, explaining his view of the emerging high-end blogosphere, is available here at, of course, the Newstex blog.
Implications: CCC’s licensing is the latest affirmation that the mainstream news world is splintering and re-knitting itself together. All kinds of content, produced by traditional journalistic brands and by others, is of interest to knowledge workers. As CCC is finding, it’s in the selection and vetting of the content — traditional editorial questions — that value is harvested. So while Newstex is now providing about 1000 blogs, that’s a tiny percentage of course of what’s out there.
Derek Gordon, vp/marketing at blog search engine Technorati, estimates that of the 109 million blogs the company tracks, 99% receive no hits within a year’s time. That tiny percentage reaffirms the notion that the world is changing dramatically on the one hand — much more content created by the minute. Yet, it is changing little on the other, with only a small percentage of it really capable of being newsworthy-to-many media.
Outsell believes that the acceptance of higher-end blogs as legitimate news content is just a toe in the water. As CCC’s Bill Burger points out, there’s good stuff in wikis, audio, video and more. The key is finding it, associated it with traditional news content and letting the user decide what to read.