I wrote yesterday that I was sympathetic towards NewsNow and its ongoing row with newspapers, especially the Times.
I’ve now decided that I’m not.
NewsNow crawls the Times site in order to gather information for its paid service to businesses as well as its free service to consumers:
Our unique filing engine is designed to match each new breaking news article, against any of thousands of complex search specifications, in seconds. Our subscription services harness the power of our filing engine for your organisation’s specific purpose.
It charges from £95 a month for tailored feeds and from £75 a month for generic (pre-built) feeds.
So it basically charges organisations to show them news stories about a given subject or keyword.
Put like that, there’s no real reason why the Times should let NewsNow crawl its site, unless it pays up to the Newspaper Licensing Authority.
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