The Financial Times today announced plans to extend its direct licence to include digital images of FT newspaper articles, which are currently licensed by the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA). The FT is beginning a period of consultation with customers and stakeholders before the change takes effect on 1 July 2010, at which point the NLA will cease issuing new licences for digital FT newspaper clippings.

The change to the NLA’s mandate is part of the FT’s direct licensing strategy. As media technology solutions multiply, the FT wants to build direct relationships with customers and ensure pricing transparency and consistency. The consolidation of digital licensing will provide FT direct licence holders with unlimited access to FT journalism, including pdfs of Financial Times newspaper articles, via FT.com, media monitoring services, press cutting agencies and news aggregation platforms, for one price*.

For existing NLA licence holders, the change will happen over the course of 12 months as each NLA licence comes up for renewal. From 1 July 2010, NLA licence holders can continue to access digital pdf images of Financial Times newspaper articles or ‘FT clippings’ without an FT direct licence until the end of their current NLA licence.

As each NLA licence comes up for renewal, an organisation will have the option to license directly with the FT for access to FT content, via FT.com and/or third party services. After the NLA licence renewal date, an organisation will no longer have access to FT clippings via third party services unless it has signed an FT licence.

The FT also plans to make FT clippings available on FT.com on a limited basis for free and on an unlimited basis for subscribers and direct licence holders.

Caspar de Bono, Managing Director B2B at the Financial Times said “We are announcing these plans early so that we can discuss how to manage the transition as effectively as possible. Our intention is to bring all digital access rights into one licence. We want to ensure transparency of pricing and consistency so that our customers pay once to access Financial Times journalism and the price is independent of the platform used to access. We look forward to discussing and shaping these plans in further detail over the next few months.”

The Financial Times’ existing corporate customers will see no increase in the cost of their FT licence as long as they do not need to increase the number of licensed users.

For more information, visit www.ft.com/corporate/nla

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Buying an FT Corporate Licence does not include a subscription to third party services.

Notes to Editors

The Financial Times introduced a direct licence in April 2008 for rights for groups of ten or more users to have unlimited access to Financial Times journalism on FT.com and via 27 other authorised agents (a list of agents is available at http://www.ft.com/corporate). The FT licence has been designed to allow users of Financial Times content to pay for content independently of the cost of the technology platform it is accessed via. The price of the FT licence is based on the number of users not the technology platforms used to access the content.

FT articles are available on FT.com for free on a limited basis. Registered users can access up to 10 articles a month at no cost. Unlimited access requires a subscription. This can be done either by purchasing a single subscription to FT.com for an individual’s personal use. Or by buying a group subscription for two or more people to have access rights to FT.com.

Anyone can use the email linking tool on FT.com to share a link to an article on FT.com. There is no limit on the number of links that can be sent and it is free to send the link. The recipient can then access the article on FT.com as either a registered user or as a subscriber.

The NLA currently has a mandate to licence the photocopying of newspaper articles from the Financial Times and the rights to view digital images of newspaper cuttings on eClips. The NLA will retain the mandate to licence photocopying.

About the Financial Times

The Financial Times, one of the world’s leading business news organisations, is recognised internationally for its authority, integrity and accuracy. Providing extensive news, comment and analysis, the newspaper is printed at 23 print sites across the globe, has a daily circulation of 400,827 (ABC figures December 2009) and a readership of 1.3 million people worldwide. FT.com is the definitive home for business intelligence on the web, providing an essential source of news, comment, data and analysis for the global business community. FT.com attracts 11.4 million unique users, generating 83.2 million page views (ABCe figures, March 2009) and now has over 1.8 million registered users

For further information, please contact:

Kristina Eriksson, Financial Times, +44 20 7873 4961 or kristina.eriksson@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. You may share using our article tools. Please don’t cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.

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