Reuters, NewsCred Launch New Entertainment Package

If you’re a brand looking to play pop culture publisher during the 2012-2013 entertainment awards season, Reuters and NewsCred want your business. The media company and the content licensing and syndication firm have partnered to launch Red Carpet Ready, a package of special coverage, created by Reuters and hosted by NewsCred, that includes exclusive editorial content around shows like the Oscars, the Grammys and the Golden Globes. Reuters' regular entertainment reporters will continue to cover those shows and events like the SAG awards and Bafta for subscribers to its entertainment coverage. That standard coverage will also be included in the new package. But Reuters will also have separate journalists, led by editors Arlene Getz and Kathy Jones, dedicated to creating entertainment content—including editorial, video, photos, behind-the-scenes celebrity interviews and archival footage—that will only be available to the new offering’s subscribers. The package will also feature coverage from guest contributors including film critic Leonard Maltin, former editor of Bon Appétit Barbara Fairchild, video journalist Jon Groat and entertainment blogger Anna Pickard. Reuters social media editor Anthony De Rosa will lead the live blog coverage included in the package. The package was tailored to target brands as subscribers, as marketers increasingly need quality content to push out to the audiences they’ve accumulated on social feeds like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, according to NewsCred CEO Shafqat Islam. “Brands are starting to look for more compelling and more engaging content, and Reuters has this brand name within the journalism space that resonated,” he said. The team is “really making an effort to create content with personality,” Islam added. “That's something that's different from what Reuters traditionally creates in-house. That's another reason we're doing this specifically for brands. … You're selling content to brands you need that [have] personality and flare.” The new Reuters-NewsCred offering is also aimed at online publishers who want a ready-to-use entertainment package that goes beyond the standard Reuters coverage. “The Red Carpet Ready solution provides online publishers and brands with access to high-quality, exclusive, behind-the-scenes Reuters journalism, images and video for the 2012-2013 entertainment awards season,” Steven Schwartz, Reuters’ evp global head of strategy, marketing and business development, said in a statement. “Working with NewsCred has enabled us to develop a package that serves the evolving needs of digital newsrooms, enabling online publishers to quickly deploy dynamic content for their audiences, and secure sponsorship and advertising opportunities that might otherwise be unattainable.” Islam said that some of NewsCred’s existing clients will be taking on the new Reuters offering but declined to name specific brands. A growing number of marketers are licensing and curating content as part of their marketing strategies. Pepsi, for example, earlier this year launched Pepsi Pulse, a daily “pop culture cheat sheet” that mixes news licensed through NewsCred with crowdsourced content from platforms like Twitter and Instagram, and lives on the brand’s homepage. NewsCred has a proprietary content management system aimed at making publishing websites easy, and some marketers use licensed content in mobile apps. NewsCred also this summer partnered with real-time ad platform Flite to bring licensed news content to online ad units.

Brand Marketing

Reuters, NewsCred Launch New Entertainment Package

Red Carpet Ready aims exclusive awards show coverage at brands, publishers

Gabriel Beltrone

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