Introducing ScoopPro

Wednesday, 15 November 2017, 3:47 pm
Article: Scoop Publishing

ScoopPro is a new offering aimed at ensuring professional users get the most out of Scoop and support us to continue improving it so that Scoop continues to exist as a public service for all New Zealanders.

The transition to ScoopPro involves important changes to Scoop products and publishing policies that professional users need to be aware of: Scoop’s terms and conditions now require ‘professional users’ of Scoop to hold a ScoopPro ‘Professional use licence’.* This means people and organisations using Scoop professionally (e.g. for research, news intelligence, or PR purposes in the workplace) need a ScoopPro Account in order to comply with our copyright terms.

*Professional use of Scoop includes: Reading the Scoop.co.nz website at work, on mobile devices and at home (for business purposes), making copies, sending links to clients and colleagues, printing news items out, sharing news items internally, and monitoring Scoop using third party media monitoring tools such as Google Alerts.

How this change affects organisations using Scoop
In order to make becoming a ScoopPro user more attractive we have announced the following changes to our publishing policy as of today 15 November 2017 in order to provide extra value to paying ScoopPro clients:

“As of November 2017, Submissions from ScoopPro users will receive priority consideration for publishing, and only ScoopPro news item submissions (including Press Releases) will be permitted to include hyperlinks, images, audio, video or other multimedia content. (This change will apply retrospectively to remove hyperlinks from all past news items published on Scoop by Non-ScoopPro clients.)”

ScoopPro also makes Scoop more useful to organisations - offering them powerful professional news intelligence services and enhanced Press Release publishing features.

Note - this change will not affect the ability of individuals and Community organisations to access or publish news on Scoop. We can offer discounts on a case by case basis to community organisations, and Scoop will still always publish Newsworthy content regardless of the source on a case-by-case basis.

Why ScoopPro matters
After more than 18 years as the go-to place for a timely feed of breaking news press releases, Scoop is central to the national news ecosystem. Many people take for granted that Scoop’s free stream of breaking news and public news archive will always be around. However, without the financial assistance of our professional users; those whose material we publish and distribute, and those who routinely access Scoop for business intelligence, Scoop will not be able to continue this service indefinitely.

For our first 15 years of operations the majority of Scoop’s income came from advertising income. However that source of income - as a reliable means for funding our operations - dried up in 2014. Scoop receives no Government grant or institutional support, and the fact that it has survived this long is testament to the tenacity of its founders, core supporters and staff.

Securing the long-term future of Scoop has been our focus for the past three years as we have begun the transition to this new professional user funded model. Scoop has been generously supported in this effort through crowdfunding campaigns by a number of loyal individuals who believe in our role in providing independent journalism and an uninterrupted publicly accessible news source. However, raising funds from such generous individuals will never be a sustainable model for journalism alone, so Scoop’s end-goal has always been to develop a new model by which commercial users of this service pay for the value they gain so that we can continue providing publishing services to the public for free.

Many people and organisations already find Scoop.co.nz useful for business, and so far 180 organisations are ScoopPro licenced users. These commercial users support us because they recognise the value of Scoop’s timely business intelligence news-feed, it’s open approach to publishing, and it’s readership that includes thousands of news-makers, influencers and decision-makers.

We are nearly there, Scoop is now funded almost entirely by these professional users through licences and the purchase of ScoopPro subscription services. Current professional services revenues supports and improves the services that Scoop provides to its readers and ensures our news source remains open for free public access to support an informed society. However, we are requesting the collaboration of the rest of our professional users over the remainder of 2017 and beyond in order to enable us to continue serving NZ’s business and news-making community.

ScoopPro fees help to cover the costs of publishing the curated Scoop.co.nz news feed. This commercial revenue enables us to ensure the content supplied by our professional users (licensed or not) continues reach a large, high-quality audience. Scoop publishes around 1,000 stories each week to a monthly readership of over 500,000. We also host the largest public news archive in NZ dating back almost 20 years which forms a valuable resource for many professionals.

Scoop is the go-to source for press release information in search, both online and in often more costly commercial news subscription products. When content is sent to Scoop it is also automatically included on a filtered basis in Scoop’s Newsagent push email services which reach thousands of users in the ScoopPro community, including many central government institutions, corporates, media, businesses, NGO’s and more.

Scoop currently provides a highly networked and mutually beneficial ecosystem it to NZ’s professional ‘news making’ and ‘news using’ community. Simply put, however, without growing our income from ScoopPro licensed organisations, Scoop cannot continue to meet the costs of providing and upgrading this complex information infrastructure. This would be a loss not only for the professional users of Scoop but also for the many individuals, students, community groups etc. who use Scoop regularly to stay informed. In today’s often misleading news environment, a stable reliable source of news ‘without spin’ direct from the sources is highly valuable as a matter of public record and a resource for monitoring and questioning those with power.

For this reason we are calling on organisations that value Scoop’s comprehensive, open and publicly accessible news feed, to support Scoop to maintain and enhance this news channel into the future. We strongly encourage any organisation with the means to do so to purchase a ScoopPro license now. We also encourage community groups and nonprofits to contact us regarding a discount or exemption to ensure you can continue to access the full benefits of Scoop’s publishing system.

Please refer the decision-makers of any relevant organisations to the ScoopPro page to find out more.

How ScoopPro works
When an organisation becomes a licensed ScoopPro organisation all staff are thereafter legally authorised to use Scoop and make use of all Scoop Content for professional purposes. ScoopPro organisations’ News Items will be automatically permitted to include hyperlinks and will be prioritised for publishing by our editorial team.

Conversely if an organisation is not a licensed ScoopPro organisation, when staff use Scoop for professional purposes then they are doing so in breach of our clearly advertised terms and conditions of use. News Items received from non-licensed organisations will be unable to include hyperlinks and will only be published once all urgent public interest news and ScoopPro client news is published.

(Professional purposes in this context includes: accessing timely raw news information, conducting business research - e.g. finding clients, checking what competitors are doing on Google, or sending links to your press release published on Scoop to business contacts or clients).

We have taken a permissive approach up until now to organisations using Scoop without a license, however we are now forced to get more serious about this and will be more actively monitoring the use of Scoop by organisations who fail to comply with our licensing terms. Such organisations are effectively free-loading and are threatening our ability to provide the public and other paying clients with a service that many New Zealanders use daily and find useful.

Additional Benefits of a ScoopPro License
Becoming a licensed ScoopPro organisation now also benefits organisations by unlocking access to advanced new professionally useful features which are available only to ScoopPro users.

ScoopPro effectively makes organisations ‘Power Users’ of Scoop - offering them powerful professional news intelligence services and enhanced Press Release features; InfoPages and Newsagent.

InfoPages ensures organisations’ outgoing communications on Scoop are optimised for maximum impact.

Newsagent enables teams to access a timely news intelligence news-stream via newsletters containing links to news on the latest developments in each region and/or key industry sectors.

Who is ScoopPro for?
We currently have over 180 ScoopPro licensed organisations who value access to Scoop’s useful publication and business intelligence service. Our current ScoopPro users come from all sectors including business, government, community, professional services and media. The list of all licensed organisations is available here.

ScoopPro Summer Sales Offer
Over the next two months we have set a target of getting 100 more ScoopPro licensed organisations on board. This number of additional organisations will secure long-term sustainability for Scoop by the end of 2017. This will also enable us to shift our focus to further expand the range of professional services and important public access content we can offer next year.

What Does ScoopPro Cost?
ScoopPro is affordable - costs are scaled according to organisation size making it within the reach of all organisations. We can also make arrangements regarding discounted rates for nonprofits or community organisations. We believe strongly that no organisation should be prevented from using Scoop due to lack of finance, however equally we strongly encourage organisations to be honest and support this collective ecosystem if they can afford to do so and get value from it. This model has potential to ensure that Scoop remains as an information resource into the future for all New Zealanders – individual or professional to assist a well-informed society.

Click For More Details on ScoopPro

How Can Non-Professional Users Support Scoop?
Members of the public who appreciate the work Scoop is doing are also most welcome to support us to provide more independent public interest focused journalism as we make this difficult transition to a professional user funded model. To this end Scoop has partnered with innovative local journalism crowdfunding platform PressPatron. Through the PressPatron portal on Scoop you can now make a one-off or recurring monthly donation of any amount.

If you simply value Scoop as a news source and would like to help then you can support Scoop.co.nz by donating to the Scoop Foundation through a partnership we have formed with innovative local journalism crowdfunding platform - PressPatron.

Every little bit of support helps us as we work towards completing the ScoopPro business model transition to a stage where Scoop Publishing is generating surpluses and able to return dividends to the Scoop Foundation.

Over the first year of its existence the Scoop Foundation has funded a number of public interest journalism projects through crowdfunding from supporters. These include a series on Post Natal Depression by Alison McCulloch, and a series on the Kaikoura Earthquakes which we expect to publish shortly. When it is able to do so, the Scoop Foundation will invest in further in-depth investigative journalism grants.

Click to support Via PressPatron

Thank you for your support.

The Scoop Publishing Team

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