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Licensed news content: what a publisher may republish, edit and put its name on

A licence for editorial material answers five questions: where you may publish, what you may change, whether you must credit the supplier, what happens to images and what happens when you stop paying. Read those five clauses before anything else.

The five clauses that matter

  • Scope. Usually a non-exclusive right to publish on named or verified domains. Exclusive rights cost more and are rarely needed for routine coverage.
  • Editing. Whether you may shorten, rewrite, localise and translate. For a newsroom, the answer must be yes; material you cannot edit is advertising.
  • Attribution. Some plans require a visible credit line, others allow publication under the publisher's own name. Check which applies to your plan, not to the supplier in general.
  • Images. Images come in rights classes: the supplier's own graphics, licensed bank images, free-licence images passed on as references with their conditions, paid stock under its own licence. Each class carries different obligations.
  • Termination. What happens to material already published when the plan ends. The fair answer is that it stays published; only new deliveries stop.

Responsibility for changed text

Once a newsroom materially rewrites a delivered draft, the result is the newsroom's own editorial work. A good licence says so explicitly and asks you not to attribute the changed text to the supplier. Record substantial edits in your review workflow so the record of who wrote what survives.

Corrections are part of the licence

The supplier should deliver corrections and retractions through the same channels as the original material, and the publisher should apply them or clearly mark where its published version diverges. A licence without a corrections clause leaves the reader unprotected.

How this works in Doxx

The Doxx content licence grants a non-exclusive, worldwide right to publish, edit, shorten and localise delivered text on your verified domains. Attribution rules depend on the plan; the Free plan requires a visible credit. Image suggestions are labelled by rights class. Corrections travel through the delivery channels, and already published material stays published if a plan ends. The methodology page explains who stands behind the material.

Read the licence, then test it with a Stream on the Free plan.

Try it on your own editorial brief

The Free plan includes 50 credits. Set up one Stream, receive drafts for a week and decide with real material in front of you.