After being in the news business for 14 years, and providing a Creative Commons licence for other publishers to use their stories, GroundUp News is changing its game.
As of 1 April, GroundUp’s licencing conditions will change.
“We’re giving selected republishers permission for a year to republish under our new licence, at no cost,” said Nathan Geffen, GroundUp director. “Our current intention is to renew permission annually and to continue to make our content available at no charge to legitimate republishers. We also have the right to withdraw permission but I hope that doesn’t need to happen.”
Geffen said he always has been and remains a big fan of Creative Commons licences.
“It seems noble to share what you produce for anyone to copy (under certain conditions) at no charge – and to share knowledge as a common good, not as a commodity. The Creative Commons licence we used was extremely useful for getting GroundUp’s work widely reproduced and recognised. I’m a little anxious that we’re giving up on it. But I think for where GroundUp is today, and given how the world has changed since we started in 2012, it makes sense for us to move to our new licence.
Unscrupulous ‘news’ sites
In a letter to existing republishers, Geffen said GroundUp had grown immensely over the past 14 years.
“The aim of publishing under a Creative Commons Licence was to increase the number of people that read our articles. For a long time this made sense because we had comparatively little traffic to most publishers. That has changed though; GroundUp now typically gets over a million page views a month, sometimes considerably more, and driving traffic to our website has become increasingly important to us,” he explained.
But behind the decision also lies the fact that unscrupulous journalists and ‘news’ sites simply reuse the stories, publish them on their sites and fail to credit the source.
“The world has changed. Partly because of the emergence of AI and the increasing sophistication of social media tools, it has become very easy to set up ‘news’ sites that simply take content from other sites and republish them,” Geffen wrote in his letter.
“Often these republication sites are low-quality, in which news is secondary and the primary aim is advertising or some other commercial scheme. We believe it demeans our work to be published in this way.”
AI-slop producers
Asked which ‘news’ sites hijacked GroundUp stories, Geffen told The Media Online this was a complicated question.
“Any site that publishes a GroundUp article published under the Creative Commons licence we’ve been using – materially unchanged and appropriately crediting authors, photographers and GroundUp – is not hijacking our material; they are acting legally. But for various reasons, explained here, we don’t think it makes sense to continue publishing our articles under this licence anymore.
But, he added, “… there are sites, especially AI slop producers like BNN Breaking (now defunct, thankfully) that use our content without attribution. This is a violation of the Creative Commons licence. This problem won’t go away under our new licence. But perhaps we may be a little more legally assertive from April when we go live with the new licence.”
Protecting its credibility
Regarding AI influence, Geffen said, “There were sites that took content, put it through LLMs and then ran it as their own story. These sites often ranked high in Google searches. But Google appears to have addressed this and I think it’s less of a problem now, though I’m not sure.”
Either way, GroundUp is taking steps to protect the credibility of its stories. Licensees who are members of the Press Council should experience no problems.
“If a republisher is a member of the Press Council we are very likely to grant permission to republish our content at no charge, without much ado,” said Geffen. “While we’re not instituting a blanket veto against republishers who are not members of the Press Council, the onus will be on them to convince us that they should get permission.”
GroundUp is giving selected republishers permission for a year to republish under its new licence, at no cost.
If your organisation wishes to be given permission to publish, at no charge, under this licence, please email info@groundup.org.za.
