Editorial
With the arrival of October, FreePint once again focuses on the news category of content, as we have been doing for over a decade. Among the projects you'll see in the coming weeks:
- Our 8th annual Survey on News Needs & Preferences, documenting how information buyers fit news licensing into their portfolio management
- In-depth reviews of market-leading news databases
- A comparative report compiling characteristics of the news-related products we've reviewed over the past 12 months
- Expert analysis of how news content shows up in and is valued within today's organisations.
Register for updates about - and tasters of - this coverage through our Topic Series "News, and Other Commodities", which runs from October to December.
Over the years, our coverage of "news" has bled into related types of content, notably social content. But there are other types of content that, increasingly, behave like news content in the way that workers want to interact with them:
- Company information
- "People" information
- Industry information
- Financial information
... and more.
We consider these the "commoditised content types", because their full value within an organisation is less the content itself and more how it is managed, delivered, integrated, or mined. It's easy (and often free) to find people in detailed databases like LinkedIn. But licences and tools that enable a company to pipe that data into its own CRM, sales tools or competitive intelligence platforms? That's value.
We've said for years that news is the bellwether for other types of content: news was the first type of content to be in high demand for delivery to mobile devices; news was one of the first to be integrated into workflows; news was also one of the pressure-points for reduced costs because, hey, we're drowning in the free stuff, aren't we?
Register your interest in "News, and Other Commodities" to stay on top of the latest research, reviews and analyses on how content streams are entering organisations and creating value once there.
I'm always excited to come back to news every October. This year, our studies will take us farther than ever.
Robin Neidorf
Director of Research, FreePint
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