Following three years of planning, NewsRight's industry reach is already substantial. It has 29 co-investors and 30 additional participating companies, representing more than 800 web sites of U.S. newspapers.
David Westin, former ABC News president and NewsRight's founding CEO, hopes the company will help sustain original content production. NewsRight's News Registry platform tracks websites, blogs and other Internet aggregators to measure the spread of its participants' content.
"NewsRight is designed to address an issue in the marketplace of an increased appetite for news but some real challenges to supply," Westin told Mashable. "There is a flaw in the business model right now. Value is not going to those who pay, and we want to correct the imbalance."
The company provides publishers with strings of HTML code to insert in their stories' headlines and text, so they can track the spread of each piece of their content. The encoded stories report to the registry, showing where and when a story is reblogged and read.
Though Westin hopes NewsRight will help correct the broken business model in the new industry, NewsRight does not tell its publisher partners what to do with its information. Publications can chose if they would like to do nothing, believing their contents' aggregation promotes their brand, seek licensing fees individually or join with other participants to obtain licensing through NewsRight.
Do you think NewsRight can bring extra revenue to a depleted media industry? Let us know in the comments.