Q: Increasingly, I'm reading that publishers are likely to start charging for at least some of their online news content. If this comes about, will our ability to obtain news content be hindered by micropayments, pay walls, or other purchasing controls that publishers may implement?

A: Paraphrasing from Wikipedia, a micropayment system bundles a number of small fees and collects the accumulated amount of money as one regular payment. A pay wall, according to Wikipedia, blocks access to a webpage with a window requiring payment from a credit card.

In regard to media monitoring, BurrellesLuce Executive Vice President Steve Shannon says there's just one reason to be concerned about micropayments and pay walls. "These matters are relevant only if you use an Internet monitoring service that lacks the capacity to locate premium content from protected sources," he explains. A protected source, he adds, is contetn that requires membership or a paid subscription to view.

Shannon, a longtime veteran of the media relations industry, emphasizes that micropayments and pay walls are not an issue as long as a PR practitioner's online monitoring service "returns headlines, abstracts and links from both free and subscription-based sites--as BurrellesLuce does." For a BurrellesLuce client, he notes, the legal authorization to receive and share the whole text of a news item is conferred by the modest royalty fee that BurrellesLuce includes in its story rates,and then passess on to content owners.

"Essentially, BurrellesLuce acts as the micropayment coordinator," Shannon says. "Our clients don't need to worry about running into pay wallsm and they gain peace of mind from knowing that the articles they obtain from us adhere to copyright law. It's a double win for them."

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