The tide of news aggregators continues
Jinfo Blog

11th January 2010

By Penny Crossland

Item

Last week saw a further development in the battle between news aggregators, specifically NewsNow and newspaper publishers (see Tim Buckley Owen’s posting http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27632). Rupert Murdoch’s News International, which had not joined the Newspaper Licensing Agency’s web licensing scheme decided to take action into its own hands. As reported by paidcontent.org (http://digbig.com/5baxje), the Times Online has now blocked NewsNow from linking to Times content. This apparently is achieved by making changes to the robots.txt protocol, preventing NewsNow spiders from collecting news stories. According to paidcontent.org, a spokesperson from The Times commented that “News International makes a significant investment in journalism and we believe that it is entirely appropriate for us to ask that our rights are respected. NewsNow has acknowledged that they require our permission to use our content and, in the absence of our permission, has ceased to do so.” This is fair enough from the Times‘ point of view, however one wonders why Murdoch has singled out NewsNow at this point, when Google News and Yahoo do exactly the same thing. As parts of News International put up paywalls for their online content in months to come, no doubt other aggregators will come up against the same resistance. Undeterred by the battles between News International and NewsNow, another aggregator, One News Page (http://www.onenewspage.co.uk) launched its UK news site in December last year. Its remit is to report on domestic news only and claims to provide access to headlines from 300 UK sources – including The Times. A global site (http://www.onenewspage.com) and a German language site (http://www.onenewspapge.de) were launched earlier in 2009, and there are plans to roll out sites for the Australian, Indian and USA markets during the course of the year. A Spanish language site is also in the offing. It will be interesting to monitor how this aggregator fairs – at launch,the One News Page press release (http://www.onenewspage.co.uk/press.php) said its free access to users will “remain so for the foreseeable future“.

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