Kevin Taylor is President, Chartered Institute of Public Relations. [Twitter]

I seem to have stumbled into a parallel universe…  not only do I find myself writing for a PRWeek blog; I’m also in a world where reading my morning newspaper on the internet incurs a daily charge.  In fact, if you are reading this in my parallel world you’ll soon receive my invoice for £1.50.

Or at least, that seems to be the world that the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) wants us all to embrace.

Some background – the NLA is not some government-backed Quango operating with all the force of Parliamentary law.  It is purely a commercial body, owned by some of the newspaper publishers, which uses copyright law as the opportunity to levy fees on commercial and public organisations, suppliers and the PR industry in general for reproducing news content.

Originally the justification for NLA fees was that potential sales of physical newspapers were lost when one person or organisation bought the paper, cut out all the relevant articles, photocopied them and sent them to a whole bunch of potential customers of the original product.

The notion that actual paper sales are important to a newspaper’s business has long since disappeared with the rise of free newspapers – it’s readers that matter because that’s what attracts advertisers.

Of course, cut-out pieces of a newspaper without their adjacent adverts doesn’t really help the newspaper business model and therefore some compensation for the loss of a potential reader of the advertising is an argument that might have some merit.

Hold that thought for just a moment.

Up until the recent announcements by the NLA (well covered in PRWeek) one way for an organisation to avoid NLA charges was for it to forward links to coverage rather than actual cuttings.

Providing a link sent potential readers to the original source of the story and its adjacent advertising, added to the web hits of the site itself, which pleases advertisers, and of course the material is provided on the site free of charge. 

Seems like a perfect solution.  Imagine a local authority press officer who receives an article from his cuttings agency on transport policy in a national newspaper and forwards this as a link to 20 people in the transport planning team, to all 60 councillors and 20 of the council’s most senior managers.

The web site in question receives maybe 100 extra visitors from that authority alone – and that situation gets repeated in the press offices of just about every local authority in the country. Wonderful, thousands more readers, lots of web hits to drive those traffic numbers up and please advertisers.

And then along come our friends at the NLA from their parallel universe who say: “No, that’s covered by copyright law and we need to charge you for providing that link.”

“But the content on the site is free to read,” you foolishly argue. 

Apparently that’s not the point. It’s their site, not yours. If you think it is good for your business to send people to their site, then you must pay.

“But your site depends on readers for its revenue.  I’m effectively sending you customers,” you plead.

But, according to the NLA, you are doing it for your benefit not theirs, therefore you must pay.

It is an absolute nonsense.  If I call someone and tell them a web address – no charge (at least not one proposed yet).  But if I send them the web address by email – that requires an NLA licence and, depending on how I acquired the link in the first place, it could well incur a per-event charge as well.

If instead of sending the link, I send a link to the Google news search that includes the link – no charge.

You see Google news has been exempted from NLA charges.  If the NLA attempted to charge Google one of two things would happen:  with deep pockets for litigation Google could mount a legal challenge to the ridiculous charges; or it could simply drop the newspaper titles concerned from its search engine – causing a massive drop in web visitors to those sites and subsequently a loss of advertising revenue.  Because you see, in the real world, forwarding links to the sites is good for their business.

I want newspapers to be successful and profitable. I want good standards of journalism and I’m prepared to do my bit: buy a quality daily newspaper and not rely on the free sheets.  I hope advertising and online revenues pick up and our best newspapers survive and thrive.

But these latest proposed NLA charges are not the way to fund the newspaper industry. They are nonsensical.  The Government needs to be strong enough to stand up to the newspaper owners and impose some regulation on the NLA. 

They are simply a commercial organisation trying to make a living – but they can’t invent a parallel universe in order to justify their charges.

Kevin Taylor, CIPR President

Still perplexed by the NLA’s proposed new web licence? The CIPR has updated its guidance on the NLA to explain the changes and how these will affect its members. If you have any queries, please contact CIPR Public Affairs Officer Emma Hamilton at emmah@cipr.co.uk because, well, that's the way they want it!