NEW YORK: Dow Jones has filed a lawsuit against media and communications platform Cision for breach of contract, less than one year into a multi-year partnership.
The lawsuit was filed in New York on Monday. It comes after Cision CEO Cali Tran sent Dow Jones an email last month saying that Cision would “suspend further payments to Dow Jones” because “Cision has lost $6.5 [million] on this relationship” and “the partnership is not economically viable” for Cision, the court documents state.
A Dow Jones spokesperson said in an emailed statement that Cision informed Dow Jones that it was no longer willing to pay the contractually agreed-upon fees to access “our authoritative journalism and the unparalleled depth and breadth of content within the Factiva platform.”
The agreement neither permits Cision to “suspend” payments to Dow Jones, nor compels Dow Jones to renegotiate its terms simply because Cision claims to be losing money, according to the court filing.
“We take protection of our content very seriously; Cision’s unexpected decision has left us with no choice but to take legal action to protect our rights and the rights of other publishers within the Factiva ecosystem,” a Dow Jones spokesperson said via email.
During the legal process, Dow Jones said it will do “everything in its power” so customers retain uninterrupted access to its news and information.
In September 2023, Cision entered into a long-term agreement to exclusively distribute Dow Jones content to PR and corporate communications pros. In exchange for this exclusive license, Cision agreed to pay annual fees totaling $173,624,000 over eight years, according to the court filing.
In the lawsuit, Dow Jones said it is entitled to damages in an amount to be determined at trial, but not less than the sum of Cision’s fixed annual fees for the full term of the agreement.
Under the agreement, Dow Jones’ publications were fully integrated into Cision’s media intelligence platforms, CisionOne and Cision Communications Cloud, giving clients ungated access to outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch and Investor’s Business Daily.
The agreement aimed to help PR and marketing practitioners better manage brand reputation, monitor business-critical topics and advance global communication strategies, according to a Cision statement.
Cision also integrated select content from the Dow Jones’ Factiva business intelligence feature into its platforms, offering customers the ability to monitor and analyze content from thousands of licensed sources globally. Users of Cision’s premium platforms also received digital subscriptions to Dow Jones’ outlets.
“Cision simply decided that it no longer liked the terms of the deal it had struck, and decided instead to willfully abandon its obligation to pay for the valuable content that powers the engine of its media-monitoring service,” state the court documents. Only after declaring that the deal it had struck less than a year ago was “not economically viable” did Cision’s attorneys raise for the first time a number of pretexts for why it no longer wishes to pay the agreed-upon contractual license fees, the court documents state.
“These post-hoc excuses were merely an attempt to mask Cision’s fundamental mismanagement of its role as licensee of the premium, reliable news content that is the essential fuel for its media-monitoring services,” they explain.
A Cision spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.
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