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Firm Files Believable, Newsy Copy, for a Price
Rick Smith, founder and chief executive of NewsUSA Inc., with copies of clippings from his service.
(By Lucian Perkins -- The Washington Post)
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Examples of the company's published successes are strewn throughout its cramped offices. Hundreds of them are tucked inside binders on a shelf by Smith's desk. Thousands more are compiled on stacks of CD-ROMS. Framed examples hang on the wall by the entrance. Another heap of clips sits in a basket for an employee to enter into a database.
Smith needs as many clips as he can get because they demonstrate the company's reach. A June 2005 piece written for Johnson & Johnson, for example, appeared in newspapers with a combined circulation of 3 million. The cost of buying the equivalent number of ads in those publications, he estimated, was upwards of $750,000. NewsUSA was paid $5,500.
"The more clips I have, the more proof I have of usage. I'm always looking for ways to get editors to send in more clips," he said.
The issue is so important to Smith that he recently offered incentives such as refrigerators, gas grills and DVD players to editors who send in tear sheets showing that they published a NewsUSA article.
"Each clipping we receive counts as 250 points," explained the rules for the company's "Editor Rewards Program," with extra points offered if the clips are unedited.
After Jim Romenesko ribbed the program on his media Web site, Smith renamed it "the clipping retrieval program," to emphasize that he was not trying to use the offer of merchandise to persuade editors to run NewsUSA stories.
"One of my young media people may have gotten a little carried away talking about grills" in the material promoting the rewards program, he said.
Some people have signed on to participate, but no one has yet earned merchandise from the current program.
NewsUSA's restrained style, Smith insists, is what gets copy published. He estimates the company has lost at least a dozen clients because of its editorial standards, which aim to produce articles that read like independently researched news stories and try to keep overt promotion to a reasonable level.
"I didn't want to impact our relationship with newspapers that has taken so many years to build, because [clients] want to be the tail wagging our dog," said Smith, 52.
"They'll arm-wrestle you," Londre said of NewsUSA. "They won't let you have 99 brands" mentioned in a story.
Such standards do not impress media watchdogs who have criticized the Bush administration for paying a columnist to tout its education policies and contracting a local firm to place stories by U.S. troops in Iraqi newspapers. A new Senate bill would require government agencies to better disclose promotional efforts. The Public Relations Society of America has issued similar guidelines.
