The Newstex Customer Portal accelerates content licensing for information platforms

Too often, information platforms that supplement their news coverage with licensed content are faced with an unnecessary tradeoff between quality and scale. Content licensing can be a solid way to attain comprehensive coverage of any given topic but the source selection and vetting process can be taxing. Teams must ensure that each source is authentic, the proper rights are in place, and their efforts stay within budget. The Newstex Customer Portal streamlines and accelerates this process, and today it becomes available to every platform that licenses content through us.

One year ago, we soft-launched it with a small group of the content licensing experts that we serve and have steadily developed it based on their feedback. It is now ready for wider adoption by product developers and engineers who are building AI-enabled news products and information services that need data sources they can stand behind.

Before a publication is made available to a content licensing manager for review it has already been through an extensive qualification process.

Every publication in the portal has cleared human editorial review

Before a publication is made available to a content licensing manager for review it has already been through an extensive qualification process. Our editorial team, led by Content Partnerships Manager, Maria Llamas, reviews around 800 content sources a month and accepts around 20. We judge each source according to four qualification criteria: Consistency, authority, relevance, and depth. A publication that falls short in any one of these four criteria does not advance. The content sources in our network are unique. Each one has been vetted and approved by the Newstex team with rights cleared. As a Newstex Portal user you have all the information you need to decide whether a source is suitable for your product or platform. 

The analytics show how one publication fits your whole corpus

The Newstex Portal makes approval easy. 

Each publication carries a match score against your feed, tiered so you can immediately tell a strong fit from a marginal one. Topic alignment shows where your corpus is thin and which titles would fill the gap. Content velocity tells you how much a publication actually produces and how often. Brand benchmark places it beside the sources you already work with.

All of it sits in one place on the Newstex Portal allowing you to decide without having to jump from tab to tab.

Platforms that seek comprehensive news coverage and unique data sources are finding that 'just scrape the content' is no longer a tenable approach.

The Newstex Portal has been shaped by content licensing experts

After we first wrote about the Newstex Portal, we tested it with  a small group of established Newstex clients. This version was deliberately small,. By putting the Portal  in front of experts who have been licensing content from us for years, we could see how they actually used it, and then shape it accordingly. For example, we added bulk actions after  watching people work through queues ten titles at a time. We added analytics based on the questions our clients kept asking.

The version of the Newstex Portal that is being launched today is not the end of the story, however. Forthcoming updates will see support requests move into the Portal, consolidating  exchanges between your team and ours in a single location. Also, new and specifically recommended publications will be surfaced, meaning nothing worth seeing is going to get lost in a long queue. We plan to continue honing it based on customer feedback. 

Platforms and publishers both need licensing to be legible

Here is why all of this matters.

Platforms that seek comprehensive news coverage and unique data sources are finding that "just scrape the content" is no longer a tenable approach. Scraped data leads to fragmented sourcing, murky provenance, and the possibility of legal liability. Publishers, meanwhile, spent the last few years watching their work get pulled into AI systems without consent or compensation leading to a bevy of lawsuits. 

This level of uncertainty helps no one. We have characterized  trust, capability and reward as the three essential prerequisites for fair licensingHowever, trust requires more than platitudes. Platforms must be able to obtain the high-quality content they need while publishers need to have control over the use of their work by others.. These are not optional extras. They are the bedrock on which  fair exchanges are built, and the Newstex Portal helps to fulfill these requirements for both sides of the market.

The Newstex Portal is all about providing you with the information needed to do your job with a minimum of friction.

Licensed content you can inspect before you commit to it

The Newstex Portal is all about providing you with the information needed to do your job with a minimum of friction. Our at-a-glance analytics let you quickly decide whether to bring in content, secure in the knowledge that everything you see is rights-cleared. Going forward, we will continue to develop the Portal based on your feedback. 

Learn how Newstex delivers licensed content curation services to platforms seeking variety and originality, and helps publishers expand their reach. If you are weighing your options for sourcing licensed content, our guide to choosing content licensing for data teams is a good place to start.

Ready to see the Portal itself? Request a demo with our team.

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