Silicon Valley start-up Attributor and a group of online publishers have partnered to form the Fair Syndication Consortium which aims to help publishers receive a cut of the advertising revenue generated on sites which have reproduced their content. Companies such as Google or Yahoo operate advertising networks that broker advertising to websites, and the group hopes to persuade these and other players to give them a share of the ad revenue.

Attributor Corp currently works with companies such as the AP and the Financial Times to track their text, audio and video content. If it is found that someone is using it inappropriately, the news outlet can request that it is taken down. Now, however, Attributor intends to use its technology to keep the content up, but with a share of ad revenue going to the publisher. "What we are saying is maybe there is a middle ground," said Attributor's chief executive Jim Pitkow. "If people are taking full copies of your content - why don't you take a revenue share?" Attributor would go direct to the offending company and demand a cut of the revenue.

The Consortium includes Reuters, the German press agency DPA and Politico, but not the Associated Press, which is pursuing its own plan to track its online content. The Consortium's first meeting will be today, Thursday, in New York. Pitkow told the WSJ that the company is in discussions with a number of major advertising networks, but has not yet signed a partnership, and this could be tough.

Ken Doctor at Content Bridges sees the Fair Syndication Consortium as providing the "third piece in what's emerging as a new news industry reckoning with the Web as a major distribution point." Piece one is the renegotiation of news producers' relationships with search engines and aggregators such as Google and Yahoo, piece two is paid content models, such as that proposed by Journalism Online, and piece three is anti-piracy, which is the field that Attributor is stepping into.

Indeed, over the past few months, panic has been spreading throughout the news industry as advertising revenue has started to slow and newspapers begin to find themselves in debt, and questions about whether or not to charge for content, and how to stop Google and others making money off news content which they did not produce, have been posed repeatedly. In the past few weeks, all this talk does seem to be evolving into something more concrete: first with the AP's announcement of initiatives to help consumers search news and to track their and their members' content, closely followed by start-up Journalism Online's announcement of its plan to create an easy way for publications to charge for news online, and now the founding of the Fair Syndication Consortium. Can these projects, individually or together, save newspapers?

Source: Fair Syndication Consortium, Wall Street Journal, Paid Content, Content Bridges