Paywalls and Media Monitoring
Thursday, March 28, 2013 at 9:14 
Following yesterday’s announcements that The Telegraph and the Sun are adopting paid models NLA is watching the UK newspaper movement towards paywall models with great interest. As providers of paid access to news content to professional monitoring agencies, we have a natural bias to support these changes. Anything that makes the value of content clearer tends to get our vote.
The NLA is also feeling good about the decision we made three years ago to develop eClips web. This takes data directly from newspapers’ production systems, allowing faster and more accurate coverage of what was printed. It also allows subscribing media monitoring companies and their professional users seamless access to pay-walled material. The service is also used by many publishers to feed content to licensed third parties like Factiva and Lexis-Nexis. The return on the investment comes from ensuring the professional information users who expect a premium service get the data they need, and that publishers get properly paid.
In the USA ‘soft’ or metered pay-walls have become common place, with over 400 dailies now operating this model . NLA is ready to make the connections needed between publishers, monitoring agencies and users if and when – as seems increasingly likely – the UK follows that lead.
Andrew Hughes
Commercial Director, NLA
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