Politico and Reuters have joined hands to offer articles to newspapers and sell advertising on the papers' websites, the New York Times has reported. Politico recently began offering papers a limited number of free articles, and beginning this week the papers that sign onto that service, the Politico Network, will also see the stream of daily output from Reuters and choose up to 10 articles and 10 photographs each day to use in print or on the Web.
Politico would gain the right to sell ads on the newspapers' Web pages containing the Politico and Reuters articles—though not the printed pages—and would share the revenue with the papers. At the same time, Reuters, which also has an editorial partnership with the International Herald Tribune, will begin carrying most of Politico's work on its news wires, the Times report said.
At the same time, CNN is trying to build a wire service for print media to compete with the dominant player in that field, the Associated Press, and news services focused on finance, like Bloomberg News and Dow Jones Newswires, are expanding their coverage of general-interest news. Meanwhile, newspapers face new competition from Web-based local news operations that are springing up.
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"Admittedly, this is an experiment," said Jim VandeHei, executive editor of Politico. "But we're sure there's a need."
The new service would be free for six months, and the partners could charge for the Reuters content after that. But until then, Politico would offer Reuters a foot in the door at a large number of U.S. news operations, said Christoph Pleitgen, the managing director of Reuters News Agency, which is based in London.
He said his service had just 15 newspaper clients in the United States, compared with more than 1,400 for the Associated Press. The Politico Network, introduced in September, already has more than 60 newspapers and more than 40 broadcasters as clients.
"If we can, through this, engage with potential clients we don't have a relationship with, that's fantastic," he said. "There absolutely is an untapped market."
Politico, created less than two years ago, hired a staff that included well-known newspaper and magazine journalists and quickly grew into one of the most popular U.S. sources of news on Washington and the political campaigns, with more than three million unique visitors each month.
