Adding professional news to a product looks like a technical project. It is mostly a rights project. Understanding what you are buying makes the technical part straightforward and keeps you out of trouble later.
What a content licence actually grants
A licence is permission to use someone else’s work in stated ways. It names the content, the places you may show it, who may see it, how long you may keep it, and what you pay. Anything the licence does not mention is not included. Copying a story because it is publicly readable is not a licence.
Direct deals and aggregators
You can approach each publisher yourself. That gives you a direct relationship and sometimes a better price for a single important source. It also means a separate contract, invoice, and technical integration for every publisher.
An aggregator holds agreements with many publishers and sublicenses a selection to you. You sign once, receive one feed in one format, and leave royalty reporting to the aggregator. For most products that need more than a few sources, this is the faster route.
Decide the use before the sources
- Public website, logged-in product, or internal tool?
- Full text, or headlines and summaries with links?
- How many readers, and in which countries?
- Do you need an archive, or only recent stories?
How pricing tends to work
Prices usually follow the breadth of rights and the size of the audience. Public full-text display costs more than internal use. Premium financial and business sources cost more than general news. Many agreements combine a fixed fee with a usage element, so ask for the usage reporting requirements early. They affect how you build.
Plan for the end of the licence
Find out what must happen to stored stories when an agreement ends. If the answer is removal, design for it now: keep the source and licence attached to every stored item, so that removing one publisher is a query and not a project.
