INN's First Big Deal: The Reuters Test
Start-up — or should we call it upstart — journalism has blossomed in the last several years. It’s kind of a movement, but one lacking a name, a movement without a name. We see national investigative sites, city-based online-only operations and smart topical sites. Browse the members’ list and you see everyone from the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting and the Center for Investigative Reporting, among investigative outfits, to the MinnPosts, New Haven Independents and Oakland Locals, to Fair Warning, the Watchdog Institute and Youth Today. Public radio is also represented.
INN founders talk to each other regularly, by phone, online and at the occasional conference. Yet, they haven’t had a way to easily do things in common, to harness common technology, to do common business deals. A recent deal, executed by the Investigative News Network, promises to bring some order, a model perhaps, out of the motley chaos.
INN’s deal with Reuters is a test, and a significant one for both INN members and Reuters, which will begin distributing an INN-branded product, as an add-on to its wire, by the September meeting of the Online News Association.
“This is about understanding our commercial value,” INN’s CEO, Kevin Davis, told me. “Only the market can tell us how much it values our content.” The idea: piggyback on Reuters’ extensive marketing and sales operation to take high-grade, but non-traditional branded content to many potential customers, from online-only sites, to newspapers to broadcasters. The payoffs for the 30-plus (of the current 52) INN members that have opted into the deal:
- Revenue, potentially, as Reuters and INN member sites, share licensing revenue;
- Brand awareness of these high-achieving, but nascent brands
- A few services provided by Reuters to those who opt in, proving them with some access to assets they otherwise couldn’t afford.
The deal also pushes INN’s tech abilities ahead. In using the Thomson Reuters-powered Calais, INN is able to draw its diverse content set together, and then subdivide by topics and by regions, at once making the sum of the parts greater than the individual pieces, and more marketable.
Davis says the deal includes full-text from those sites opting in, but that data and video are not included.
For Reuters, it’s a leg up in the agency world, and part of its big U.S. push (see my Thursday Nieman lab column, “The newsonomics of Reuters’ Americanization“). Reuters gets a semi-exclusive, able to exclude a handful of key competitors, including AP, from doing similar syndication. The wire offers no financial guarantees, but offers those three promises to INN members. The big hope: the establishment of a new syndication leg of revenue, as non-profit funders push for funding diversification.
For Reuters, which in the past year, has put together similar packaging deals with Examiner.com, The Wrap, SB Nation, CCTV and others, it’s a smart way to increase the content offered under its brand, but without the cost. It is learning the chops of next-age curatorial syndication, borrowing lessons from HuffPo, user-gen content and Demand Media.
What would have been an unlikely match several years ago — disparate online start-ups and a 164-year-old traditional news wire — has now taken on a logic of its own.
