Victoria S. Ekstrand's blog

Looking to make their brand “a little more memorable,” the News Licensing Group is now NewsRight – and is billing itself as an “easy rights clearinghouse for the best news reporting and original journalism on the Web.”

Earlier this month, the group announced that 29 major news and information companies have signed on as initial investors in the startup, a new independent digital-rights and content licensing venture led by former ABC News President David Westin.

(The initial investors in NewsRight are: Advance Publications, The Associated Press, Axel Springer Group, A.H.Belo Management Services, Belo Management Services, Business Wire, Community Newspaper Holdings, El Dia, Galveston Newspapers, Gatehouse Media, The Gazette Company, Hearst Newspapers, Journal Communications, Landmark Media Enterprises, The McClatchy Company, Media General, MediaNews Group, Morris Communications, Morris Multimedia, NPG Newspapers, The New York Times Company, Ogden Newspapers, Pioneer Newspapers, Schurz Communications, The E.W. Scripps Company, Stephens Media, Swift Communications, Times Publishing Co. and The Washington Post Company.)   read more »

Is it possible that the tent is the new burning flag?

While today’s Occupy tents don’t obviously carry the same symbolic or historical meaning as the American flag, it’s a question I’ve been thinking about since it was posed recently by Dr. Cathy L. Packer, faculty director of the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

And she is not alone.

As I listened to the Diane Rehm Show on NPR last month, Harvard Law School’s own Lawrence Lessig saw the situation similarly. "I don't think our framers – people who organized the conventions that produced our government – would even recognize the extent of legal regulation on the freedom of people to protest today," he said. Lessig urged Occupy protesters to make greater free speech rights one of the movement's goals.   read more »

Is it possible to create a culture for licensing news?

This is the question at the heart of a new project begun by The Associated Press, announced last April by AP CEO Tom Curley. Called The News Licensing Group, the AP, with its membership, has created a separate company to explore how tagged content can not only be tracked but also monetized.

The News Licensing Group (NLG) is an outgrowth of the AP’s News Registry project, which was announced in 2009 as a way not only to tag content but locate content thieves. That announcement attracted criticism that the AP was gearing up for a major offensive against aggregators, but that never panned out. As a new group, NLG is positioned a bit more broadly – it’s about tagging and tracking, but it’s also about creating the distribution economics for aggregators to obtain the content they want.

In short, it appears NLG is looking to embrace the new content distribution economics.

The new venture is headed by former ABC News Chief David Westin. Its new COO is Srinandan Kasi, formerly vice president and general counsel for The Associated Press.

Last week, Kasi addressed a group of lawyers and journalists at the Ohio State Bar Association in Columbus at their annual media law conference to explain what NLG is working on and to review the history of the news industry’s business choices that have led to this moment.   read more »