Andy reporting in for a bit of a blog rant and questioning session.

For the last month or so I have been seeing a growing tide of some of the greatest PR Minds talking about the Newspaper Licensing Agency's proposal to add e-clips to their armoury of media that they will be charging PR Agencies and in house clients a fee for receiving and pinging between each other or in-house.

To take it back a step, and for those who are wondering who the NLA are and what e-clips consist of, here is a crude explanation. Think of the NLA as kind of the social workers of the (until recently) print media world. They make sure us PR Agencies and in house PR people pay our due if we photocopy and distribute between ourselves chunks of newspapers or magazines in which we have got our clients coverage. No, I don't think they only wear cardigans and drive Citreon 2CV's like proper social workers.

E-clips is a media term for getting coverage for a client on an online news portal (be it a national newspaper like The Guardian, or an online only news portal such as Pocket-Lint.com). An example of a recent 10 Yetis e-clip for a client would be either this coverage for Prezzybox in The Metro, and even this story on Playboy.co.uk (nothing dodge on display, the link is safe!) for another client, iLoveMyBBQ.com. Anyway, you gets me yeah!

So, the social workers currently charge PR Agencies and in-house PR's for print coverage we achieve for our clients and now they are saying that they are going to start charging us for online coverage that we achieve as well.

At first I thought this was JUST for the times when we copy and paste the text from a site and forward it around to people, but upon closer inspection it is going to be for every link we ping around as well.

I imagine most agencies are like us and use the following technology to find online clips, Google Alerts as the minimum, an online news monitoring service such as Meltwater (our online news collector/monitor of choice for client coverage - some people use a press cuttings agency like Durrants or Precise etc) and then a bespoke in house widget as well.

This means that we will potentially see a significant increase in our NLA fees for essentially pointing our clients to a news website which they will go and read, i.e. giving that news site more readers.

Is it me, or is this a bit crazy?

I thought that I may be going a bit loco and must be confused (easily done) so I rang the NLA to get some clarification, but unfortunately they close at 12 today, social workers need a rest as well (please don't say it was for a funeral or I will feel very bad) but a nice guy pointed me to the NLA site dedicated to explaining e-clips - www.nla-web.co.uk.

If you go and read it, you can see the rumours are true... so what are we to do?

As anyone who has ever tried to shake off or delay the NLA will tell you (not us your honour, past lives only) they are like the Terminators of the social services world and they will assimilate you eventually so what are the wider options?

Well, as an agency maybe the CIPR is the answer - and ask them to start lobbying hard, but as I have said before, they are a bit behind the times when it comes to digital media (only recently got round to sorting out some guidelines for blogging and using social media - 2 years too late).

Maybe PR Week is a good lobbying point and they have covered the story already - if we all stand up to this together and make it top of the PR media agenda PR Week will have to take it on board as a key subject in the industry news agenda?

Maybe we should all do free PR to get Francis Ingham (Director General of the PRCA) knighted so he can take our plight to a higher cause - as he is already doing - check out his blog on the topic.

Personally I think there should have been much greater debate on this between the NLA, the big media outlets and the PR sector before just announcing this as a fait accompli (i have phrase of the day toilet roll!). The NLA is kind of backed into a position where they would lose face if they changed their mind, but maybe the better option for everyone would be to put back the proposed launch date of Sep 2009 for digital cuttings providers and Jan 2010 for everyone else and have a much more open and transparent debate between all parties?

And one final thought... could this have an effect on Search Engine Optimisation for several companies and especially of interest of affiliates. Will people now be less inclined to give link love to newspaper stories if they think they could be charged for doing so and as such, the newspapers authority positions in Search Engines will decline.... I have given myself a head ache!