News Agency In Bold Bid To Change The Way News Is Traded In The Media Industry

Europe’s most read and most talked about news agency is making a bold bid to change the way information is traded and exchanged in the media industry.

As a result Central European News is going to be off air for the rest of this week while we prepare to press the reset button for the launch of our new platform and news finance model. We’ll be back next week with NewsX.

In short, it’s cost and hassle-free, with access to the entire output from us and our partners, and if we get enough coverage, that content can be made available at no cost to you.

For nearly three decades, Vienna-based CEN has been at the heart of traditional front-line reporting around the world. At one time we had teams working for Associated Press TV, three reporters dedicated exclusively to the BBC, Deutsche Welle, NPR and RNI and working closely with every important title in the UK.

But times have changed and the way we produce, sell and consume news has perhaps changed more rapidly than any other field.

Encroachment by media, social media and online news mean falling revenue, which means falling budgets. There is also competition from content farms that Hoover up free, but often massively flawed, content from social media sites and which increasingly use AI instead of using humans as both reporters and sources to keep the books in the black. Once you start hollowing out that hole there’s eventually only one place left to go: Down it.

For Mike Leidig, owner and editor-in-chief of CEN and its affiliates, the solution came in two bites. First, his bruising legal battle with BuzzFeed allowed him to step outside the daily news list to see first-hand how social media news works.

The potential it offers for free content may seem like manna from heaven. But the reality is that it often leads to copying out a months-old story from a rival, who got it from a magazine, who got it from a website, which took it from a social media post that had been copied and reposted. Maybe at some point it was actually news.

The second Newton moment came as Mike began examining the stats of what made how much and where, and it was always the same answer: Less.

So from next week the agency is rebooting with a blockchain partner to launch the memecoin Newshound on the Solana chain. Newshound – or NEWSX for short – will fund news production sustainably over the long-term and determine how we get it to readers.

Mike explained: “You only need to go back a few years to find our agency right at the heart of campaigning, original reporting.

“We are an award-winning agency. Our undercover stories about the trafficking of women through the Balkans and Romania won a Paul Foot award for the Sunday Telegraph.

“And we were the first onto the brutal treatment of women in Iran over the wearing of hijabs. Again it was investment. We had people right at the heart of the action in a country where getting caught could mean getting killed.”

CEN exposed Nazis, new and old, and created a charity to help the often desperately disadvantaged subjects of our stories. Of course there may have been a few stories about caribous stuck up trees too.

Its a business model that was very natural and worked with incredible efficiency without any advertising, PR or marketing.

Very simply, our popular viral news content funded our quality news and investigations while our quality news and investigations in turn gave credibility and confirmation of the truth behind our viral news.

Sadly this business model took a huge hit in 2015 when CEN, our flagship agency, was falsely accused of being a global fake news factory.

The agency sued Buzzfeed for libel in the US in 2016 but the case never made it into a courtroom.

What did emerge in the sworn deposition stage, though, was a shocking line-by-line demolition of the BuzzFeed allegations in their own words, from their own lips.

The transcripts are also a complete insider’s guide into how a bunch of news amateurs dedicated solely to marketing did their best to choke the life out of the UK news industry

Mike explained: “Every single story that they wrote about us has been simply hoovered up from the Internet with no original reporting. The only thing they knew about me when they started was that I worked extensively for their rivals, and that Ben Smith who was head of news had approved the headline which they then needed to prop up.

“So whenever they found anything positive, it was discarded, and whenever they found anything that appeared to be negative, it was added into the mix without any checking.

“The legal case never went to trial because unlike the UK, where the media has to prove the truth of what it writes when challenged; in America, it’s the other way around.

“The BuzzFeed allegations were in some cases years old, not exactly easy to go back and cover again, and the court decided that the untimely death of CEN’s Russian correspondent and the unavailability of a part-time Chinese stringer who had written three stories meant we could not prove our case, and so BuzzFeed won.”

But not for long. Within months the plug had been pulled on BuzzFeed’s UK operation and everyone involved in the anti-CEN campaign lost their jobs.

Mike, however, has moved on. He’s developed new software to ensure news agencies can become be bullet-proof against such accusations in the future and also opened other agencies, including Newsflash, Asia Wire and Clipzilla, to join the CEN stable.

He kept the lights on with a steady stream of revenue-building, reputation-enhancing popular stories.

But he said: “This is a long way from our traditional roots as an originator of news and the only way forward is to return to this in generating exclusive content.

“The media that we work for and the media that we rely on is the source of this type of easy fix content and, understandably, now finds it cripplingly expensive to invest deeply in original news reporting. It’s either social media sourced, or recycled from material that is years old, but there is very little original reporting.

“Original reporting is expensive, and that is why we are turning to project with our own newsroom currency which could revolutionise funding in the news business.”

Under the new plan our new identity NewsX has created 33 million crypto coins. Thirty million coins will be sold on the market to keep a liquidity pool. We keep the remaining three million coins to pay journalists.

What newsdesks will notice is an ever increasing output from us as more freelancers and independents join us. It will be properly sourced and researched high quality copy. Best of all, it’s free. All a client newspaper has to do in return is carry a byline for the reporter and tag NewsX as the source, just as you’d do on any picture credit.

The CEN agency network currently employs 30 editorial staff and Mike says he is staking the future on the project

He said: “We have a vast network of media partners that we either supply directly or via other syndication partners, and this enormous network is available to publish content in the future in partnership with our Blockchain-based payments solution.

“The huge advantage is that we can build a newsroom of opposites so that we can cover any story that we want knowing that there will always be someone somewhere that wants to publish it.

“We have registered both NewsX and Newshound as trademarks and the digital coin will be launching as a memecoin on the Solana blockchain. If it works, the first thing we’ll do is bring other agencies and freelancers into the equation, and the very next thing we’ll do is fund a network of reporters using the coins in order to cover UK courts, a skill rapidly losing ground as newsroom cuts bite.

Mike said: “It is one of the founding principles of UK legal system that justice is not only done, but is seen to be done. But every day people are appearing in court and nobody knows about it. It is not exactly an incentive not to do something wrong when you know you can pay a fine and nobody will ever know.”

He explains that NewsX is a community interest company and sits somewhere between a charity and a normal not-for-profit company which is created with a purpose in mind. The NewsX purpose, as registered at Companies House, is journalism.

He said: “I believe it could reinvigorate the news agency model and lead to NAPA agencies becoming the number one independent suppliers of content in the UK, and together with other freelancers could end up with a 25% to 30% share of the UK news market without having any publishing organ of its own.

“Our model is to support traditional media partners with exclusive content at no cost, they in turn verifying it with their brand. It’s good for newspapers, it’s good for journalists and, most of all, it’s good for news. A perfect partnership.”