Tim Brooks to step down as NLA Chairman

NLA Media Access has announced that Tim Brooks is to step down as Chairman after six years at the helm.

Tim joined the company in 2014 and has overseen the transformation of the business, inducting a new Managing Director, Commercial Director, Chief Digital Officer and General Counsel/Company Secretary, while delivering 50% growth in revenues. 

Tim commented: “I am proud of what NLA has achieved over the last six years. It has been a pleasure to work with the team, and I leave happy knowing that my successor inherits a highly professional and successful management.”

Managing Director, Henry Jones said:

“Tim has been instrumental in guiding the business through times of change and rapid growth. I am personally grateful to Tim for his support in my first three years with NLA and we all wish him well for the future.”

Tim steps down in September 2019, having served two three-year terms. 

Appointment of the new Chair will be announced in the Autumn.

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Tim Brooks Biography

Tim Brooks began life as a journalist, launching Media Week magazine when in his twenties. He has been MD/CEO of major UK media brands, including the Guardian, the British Medical Journal, the NME and Ideal Home. He has been chair of the Newspaper Publishers Association, and a director of the Professional Publishers Association. He serves on several company boards, and is chair of the Advisory Council of the British Library.

PPA Festival 2019 – NLA brief publishers on new ways to monetise their content

NLA media access recently hosted a roundtable at The PPA festival - the magazine industry’s biggest event of the year. The day-long festival concentrates on the challenges and opportunities facing consumer magazine and business media brands today.  

NLA’s roundtable focused on one of the major issues facing the magazine industry today: monetisation. In an increasingly digital world, publishers have been grappling with new ways to profit from their content while ensuring they are protecting this content from copyright infringement.

Publisher representatives from leading brands and industry experts joined the session, to learn more about NLA’s growing suite of ‘publisher services’, with discussions taking place on paywalls, text aggregators, online article tracking and crawler management. Attendees left the session with plenty of new opportunities and ideas to consider.

The discussion on paywalls – something an increasing number of magazines are exploring – focussed on how NLA can ensure media monitoring organisations can still carry out their vital work and maximise licensing royalties through its database product ‘eClips Web Specialist’ – generating new revenues for Incisive Media, Faversham House and William Reed amongst others. Considering the impact on the media monitoring industry is important for any magazine publisher when deciding on how to implement at paywall.

Text aggregators can provide a useful additional revenue stream for magazines, and this provoked the most discussion during the session. Under commercial agreement, one of the ways in which text aggregators can use publisher’s content is to store such content in a searchable archive and pay royalties on access. In order to improve transparency and visibility over how publishers’ content is being used in the text aggregator market, NLA has set up a new initiative following publisher demand: Agent for Publishers. This provides NLA the mandate to effectively manage the text aggregators on a publisher’s behalf and ensure their content distribution is adequately controlled, with transparency given over content usage. Some attendees’ spoke of the unwanted overheads in managing text aggregators directly, and others spoke about historic deals they had since lost track of, so the option of utilising NLA’s expertise in this area was appealing. Through this service, NLA have also been able to distribute magazine content to new aggregators that they had not previously been working with, thus increasing revenues.

As we’ve discussed on the blog before, through its online article tracking tool ‘OATS’, NLA are able to track where magazine content has been lifted from publisher websites and re-purposed across the internet, detect copyright abuse, and have the infringing content removed. This technology helped remove over 89,400 infringing articles in 2018; protecting publishers content online and preventing further loss of revenue. Few publishers are able, or have the bandwidth, to track this in house and there is an increasing number of publishers using NLA for this service.

NLA closed the roundtable by introducing a new and developing service, ‘Crawler Management’. Across the internet, web crawlers (also known as spiders, bots or crawlers) are being used to systematically browse the web and monetise publishers content. NLA are offering to work with magazine publishers to help build ‘whitelists’ and ‘blacklists’ of good/bad bots – and hopefully turn a ‘good’ bot into a revenue opportunity through NLA’s licensing scheme and make sure ‘bad’ bots are blocked from magazine websites. Initial studies have already exposed new revenues for publishers.

Owen Meredith, Managing Director of PPA, said: “We were delighted NLA media access could support PPA Festival and share vital knowledge of how their publisher services can help boost the bottom line.”

NLA media access is continuously striving to support journalism by helping publishers expand their revenues and protect their content. As such we are delighted to have been shortlisted for ‘Industry Partner of the Year’ at the 2019 PPA Awards. See the full shortlist here

Matt Aspinall- Head of Publisher Services

NMA & NLA: the importance of partnership in 2019

Lynne Anderson- News Media Association deputy chief executiveAt the start of 2019, the year ahead promised to be one of partnership and collaboration, both for the News Media Association and the local and national news media publishers we represent.  

The past few months have seen the industry forge ahead with several successful joint initiatives.

On the commercial side, the Ozone Project has seen a number of national titles come together to bring a powerful new joint digital sales package into the marketplace.

For the local sector, the Local News Partnership with the BBC has been widely acknowledged as an example of how different sections of the industry can work together to produce genuine benefit for the public.

There is undoubtedly a growing sense of the importance of collaboration, particularly following the NMA’s new Journalism Matters campaign (13 – 19 May) which saw the industry unite to celebrate the power of news media journalism.

 On 24 May, we will embark upon a new partnership when we move from our current headquarters on Vauxhall Bridge Road into NLA media access’ premises on New Bridge Street.

The move will symbolise a coming together between two organisations who share very similar values.

We both believe passionately in the value of journalism and the importance of finding a sustainable business model to enable commercial providers to continue to invest in it.

When the call for evidence for the Cairncross Review was published, we worked together on a series of proposals designed to help the content creators reap the awards of their investment. 

The issue of the tech giants siphoning off digital advertising revenue from the creators of original journalism looms large over the industry.

Government and regulators acknowledge the problem, but action is urgently needed to help news media publishers reap the rightful rewards from their investment in news.

Despite the challenges, the industry can be encouraged that news media journalism is more sought after by the public than ever before.

Forty-eight million people in Great Britain consume news media in print or digital every month.

The value and importance of journalism to our democratic society is a key theme of the Journalism Matters campaign which highlighted the considerable economic, cultural and social benefits created by news media journalism. 

At the NMA, our mission is to champion the industry’s strengths but also to defend it from the many threats it faces. 

Globally, press freedom is under threat with journalists facing serious physical violence or threat of imprisonment just for daring to speak the truth to power.

In the UK, we should be a beacon for freedom of speech across the world yet, sadly, we languish in 33^rd place in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index.   

Our rise from number 40 last year is due in no small part to the NMA-led fightback against the draconian Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 which would have punished local and national newspapers simply for telling the truth.

But, despite this success, there is more work to be done and we will continue to fight the threats to press freedom wherever we find them.

We offer a range of services to our members including monitoring a wide variety of public policy and regulatory areas which may impact upon news media publishers.

When appropriate, we make representations on behalf of our members and put across the case for the news media industry. 

Through Newsworks and Local Media Works, the marketing bodies for the national and local news media sectors respectively, we continue to present the industry’s commercial offering to agencies and advertisers.

In addition to lobbying and representational work, we offer a range of media facilities services including press cards for journalists and administering the Royal Rota system for pooling video, pictures and copy from Royal events.

We are delighted to be embarking on this new chapter in our history by moving into new premises with NLA media access.

By collaborating and working more closely together, it will be the start of a new partnership which will benefit our two organisations and the industry we both serve.

CWRL Micro: a new price for the smallest companies

One of the NLA’s newest licences is the Corporate Web Republishing Licence (CWRL); an optional licence, it allows copies and excerpts of articles to be placed on organisations’ websites. This is particularly useful for those companies who want to use the valuable publicity of media coverage to shine a light on their work.

To date over 950 companies hold a CWRL, with over 23,000 articles featured. The licence also allows posting of media content onto social platforms.

Following a recent review NLA has launched a new “Micro” size banding for companies with a turnover of less than £2million. This alongside the existing three bands; small, medium and large, better reflects the uptake of the licence and creates an improved pricing structure for customers.

Henry Pettit, Head of Licensing for NLA, said of the new band: “Listening to feedback from clients, many small or start-up businesses really want to use the press coverage they receive by posting it on their website.  The new banding for “micro” companies is about 13% cheaper than the “small” price point and will benefit well over 300 existing clients and many new ones in the future.”

The new ‘micro’ band was introduced on 1^st April 2019.

The new price is listed online at https://www.nlamediaaccess.com/apply-for-a-licence/corporate-website-republishing-licence/

How our Online Article Tracker System (OATS) helps detect copyright abuse

Copyright abuse is a major issue that affects all publishers and creators of original content. It’s easier now, more than ever, for content to be taken, copied and plagiarised without permission of the original copyright owner. This can present a significant issue for newspaper and magazine publishers as they rely on their unique, quality content to distinguish them in a world of fake news.

In 2014, NLA media access (NLA) created the Online Article Tracking System (OATS), which uses our unique database to search for, and detect, thousands of instances of copyright abuse across vast quantities of online article data.

OATS can analyse every article that’s produced by an online newspaper over a two-month period, and then detect where these articles have been copied by other domains. Once identified, the OATS team can then remove infringing content. With vast volumes of content to analyse, this has been a huge success and has revolutionised copyright detection for many NLA publishers.

These copyright abuses range from parts-of, to full articles, as well as photographs and captions that have been copied and posted without permission. The most common types of copyright abuse are:

• Copying or lifting text from an online article and adding a credit to the name of the original publisher. This usually occurs because there is a lack of understanding about copyright law and terms and conditions. In our experience, once the infringing domain is notified, they remove the content.
• Copying or lifting parts of (or all of) the text from an online article and not adding credit or linking to the original publisher. These sites tend to design the layout to look as though it's their own original work by their own reporters.
• Occasionally, websites that replicate a major news site in terms of design and URL. Sometimes the content is kept the same, however on occasion, we’ve seen the content changed or altered slightly, which gives the article a new tone or message. These instances of slightly-altered content contribute to the issue of ‘fake news’

Since its inception in 2014, the OATS system has helped remove over 400,000 articles from over 3,400 different websites that were taking publisher content without permission. In 2018, OATS removed over 89,400 articles from 802 sources with a 90 percent success rate of removing content. 

In most instances, we contact the site hosting the copyrighted content directly, inform them that they are in breach of copyright and ask them to remove the content. This process reduces the chance of the same person or domain repeating the offence. However, if after multiple attempts we're unable to contact the owner of the website, we contact the domains hosting provider and issue a takedown notice to remove the content.

To find out more and see OATS in action, please see our white sheet: (https://www.nlamediaaccess.com/wp-content/archive/News%20OATS%20document%20%20-%20final%20draft.pdf )