News agency boss Michael Leidig has launched a not for profit company which he hopes could fix what he sees as a broken news ecosystem.
Leidig wound up four news agencies which previously provided coverage in Europe and Asia last year citing falling budgets. Many independent news agencies have closed around the UK in recent years because fees paid by national newspapers have barely risen in 40 years.
“The job used to be introducing people to perspectives they wouldn’t otherwise hear,” Leidig said.
“Now the whole system, from the way stories are commissioned to the way they’re distributed, is designed to reinforce whatever the audience already believes.”
Leidig has spent three decades running news agencies across Europe. He has watched the old infrastructure stripped away piece by piece: local papers closing, specialist freelancers disappearing, and the newsroom “supply chain” that once fed the nationals reduced to a handful of overstretched generalists.
At each stage, discovery, verification, editing, distribution and usage, the moving parts that kept journalism functioning have seized up. In their place, PR, brand content and politically motivated messaging have flooded the system.
AI has accelerated the problem, but could also provide the solution.
The basic work of restructuring copy, cleaning formats or producing first-pass drafts can now be handled in seconds.
That should free reporters up to do more newsgathering.
“But because the rest of the machinery isn’t there anymore,” Leidig says, “you end up with brilliant content and no system capable of absorbing it, verifying it, or getting it read, and therefore no way to ensure the people who did the work are credited and paid.”
What is missing, he argues, is a common standard that classifies content, content creators and content publishers so news can move cleanly across the ecosystem.
For the last decade, Leidig has been building NewsX, a Community Interest Company.
“People talk about reinventing journalism,” he said. “What I’ve tried to do is rebuild the mechanics from conception through to publication and monetisation actually work once again.”
At the centre is proof of work.
“In the agency world, if you do the editorial work and someone uses it, you get paid. It’s that simple. Social media platforms broke that when they started monetising what they don’t produce.”
NewsX is designed to reconnect that chain by documenting editorial labour, validating it, tracking and charging for usage.
Every story carries a digital fingerprint showing where it came from, what sources were used, what feedback came from desks, what revisions were made, where it was published and what payments resulted
The NewsX Press Card is a tiered accreditation system anchored to identity checks and a verified record of work. Professionals, specialists, podcasters, local spotters and thought-leaders can all join, so long as they adhere to the editorial code and accept transparency. “It’s not about status,” he says. “It’s about accountability. You can’t rebuild trust if nobody knows who did the work.”
NewsX includes a transparency tool called QC (Quis Custodiet) , a tech-enabled complaints system. Anyone can test a story against the QC Standards Code using any public AI tool.
If the AI flags concerns, a human reviewer steps in, contacts the publisher and issues a ruling within days. The outcome is published openly.
A growing number of publishers are choosing to take Newx content on a credit-only basis, guaranteeing bylines, accreditation and visibility instead of an upfront fee.
Leidig frames this not as a loss, but as a growth strategy.
Once material appears under a visible agency byline, it is typically lifted, syndicated or adapted by other outlets and those secondary uses are billed. The result is that network-wide usage is rising, even when the first placement is credit-based.
Titles such as National World, The European and the Evening Standard are already using Newsx content in this way.
Meanwhile, other mainstream outlets, from MailOnline and the New York Post to Bild and Fox News, continue to pay per usage, resulting in dozens of NewsX-sourced stories appearing weekly across the UK national press.
Disclosure:The author of this piece has collaborated with editor Michael Leidig on international news coverage for nearly a decade.
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