The deal, announced on Tuesday, involves MLB delivering customized video bundles to hometown media outlets after a game ends. “If you’re reading a column from Dan Shaughnessy on Boston.com about Dustin Pedroia’s game-winning home run, you can access video highlights right at the story page level,” said Kevin Gentzel, the CRO of NDN.

The partnership could mean some extra revenue for publishers like the NY Post and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The papers, along with radio stations, get the video content for free and earn a cut of the advertising revenue that NDN sells for the videos.

Jackson is involved as a frontman and an investor (other investors include Google’s Eric Schmidt and actor Bill Murray). “I’ve played in the tech world for a long time, be it with Microsoft, Cisco or Google. The tech bug hit me about 15 or 20 years ago,” Jackson told me by phone. “I understand the value of participation and the value of attracting eyeballs.”

For Major League Baseball, which is licensing the clips to NDN for an undisclosed amount, the deal is a way to make money from local highlights without undercutting its core product. According to Kenny Gersh, an SVP at MLB Advanced Media, the league is providing about 30 seconds of game footage along with “ancillary content” such as post-game interviews. Gersh added that the deal also makes sense because many fans prefer to get baseball news through a local beat writer.

The partnership shows the ongoing rise of syndication services like NDN and NewsCred. These companies have found a niche as middlemen, removing the friction of licensing amongst copyright owners, advertisers and publishers.

Reggie Jackson fans: here’s a vintage (non-baseball) clip of Mr. October:

The investment will see NewsCred receive $15 million in Series B funding led by Mayfield Fund, a prominent west coast venture capital firm. The company also revealed on Tuesday that the New York Times, which it has long courted, has signed on as one of its more than 2500 syndication partners.

For anyone unfamiliar, NewsCred uses technology to place a stream of relevant, licensed news content onto the websites of clients like the New York Daily News and Pepsi. NewsCred shares the revenue with its publishing partners.

CEO Shafqat Islam said in a phone interview that the new investment will allow NewsCred to grow its salesforce and expand its presence in non-English speaking markets. The plans follow NewsCred’s recent acquisition of cloud publisher DayLife and its decision to create a human editorial team to complement its algorithm-driven news service.

“Our ambitions are global,” he said. “Our ultimate ambition is to license and curate the world’s top publications.”

Islam said that licensing to brand clients, which also include Toyota and GE, now make up 50% of NewsCred’s business but that publishers remain the company’s core focus.

In an email statement, a New York Times spokesperson said, “We have our own very successful syndication business, which we are continuing to grow.  This agreement with Newscred is one way we think we might be able to expand opportunities.”

The investors taking part in the new Series B round also include Greycroft Partners whose managing partner, Alan Patricof, is a fixture of the New York media scene. NewsCred has raised $5M in previous rounds of funding from FirstMark Capital, IA Ventures, Floodgate Fund, Lerer Ventures, AOL Ventures and others.

Disclosure: NewsCred is a publishing partner of GigaOM/paidContent

NewsCred has long relied on automated curation tools to find and deliver relevant content to its clients, but now the company is adding something more to its journalism — humans. This morning, the company announced a new service named Editorial Curation that lets NewsCred clients buy hands-on human help for their story collection.

Senior editor, Claire Lambrecht, explained that the new service is composed of eight journalists with newsroom experience at places like the New York Times and Slate. She added that, while NewsCred has used humans to aid its robot curation for a while now, this is the first time humans have been offered as a stand-alone service. The idea here is that clients who buy access to NewsCred’s fire hose of news stories can now have a personal editor who has real-life newsroom judgment — such as what type of story should be at the top of a page and for how long.

She says that NewsCred’s automated “semantics can get the ball to 5-yard line but that [human] curation is the touchdown” for clients that want create a complete content experience. Lambrecht said that some clients are buying the human curation in five hour blocks, while others are paying to use it around the clock. NewsCred would not disclose exactly how much a human editor costs but did say that the price varies depending on how much editorial support a client wants; for instance, a brand might pay more for NewsCred to compile special photo features while another might simply want to pay an editor to ensure negative stories don’t surface (Pepsi, for instance, is probably not keen about reports on the New York mayor’s efforts to ban glutton-sized sodas).

The NewsCred announcement coincides with a shifting perspective on automated news. While some feared that the arrival of robot story writers and editors would phase out journalists, the human touch now appears to be back in fashion. For example, the founder of two popular aggregated news sites, Techmeme and Mediagazer, recently talked about the power of human news judgment and the editorial influence of the New York Times.

To get a better idea of how NewsCred works in practice, here’s an earlier write up of how the New York Daily News used it to create a separate news vertical to target the city’s large South Asian community.

(Image by F.Schmidt via Shutterstock)

One example is Outbrain, a well-funded “content discovery platform” based in New York that helps publishers display stories similar to the one that a reader is viewing. It also lets publishers buy and sell traffic through “recommended articles” on third party sites — for instance, Cat Fancy might (in theory) pay for one of its feline features to appear as a recommended story on Modern Cat.

Outbrain also has a lesser known business where it supplies stories to companies like GE, American Express or General Mills. The idea is that it’s easier for non-media to buy content than to produce it themselves. But while big brands have been in this game for a while, smaller companies too are feeling a growing need to buy content in order to keep their Twitter, Facebook or blog presence fresh.

Outbrain now appears to have this base covered too. Today, it announced that it has acquired Scribit, a startup that lets companies find relevant media stories and host them on their sites — for instance, Scribit could help Annie’s Kitty Co. find and license an article from Cat Fancy for its social media pages. An earlier account of Scribit says its prices are as low as $50 a month.

In the bigger picture, Outbrain’s purchase of Scribit is part of a revolution in the way that content is being passed around the internet. Companies like Outbrain and rival NewsCred are eliminating the friction that used to dog media distribution. In the past, a shoe store that wanted to attract customers by posting shoe-related articles on its website had two impractical choices: engage in costly licensing negotiations or pirate the articles and risk a lawsuit. Now that shoe store can pay a single license fee for access to a wealth of content and a way to host them.

“The growth of content marketing has been unbelievable in the last 18 months,” said Gilad De Vries, SVP of Strategy at Outbrain. “The ability for brands to have the abilty to showcase licensed content is very valuable.”

De Vries did not disclose how much the six-year old Outbrain, which is backed by $64 million in venture funding, paid for Scribit.

(Image by Minerva Studio via Shutterstock)

Today, NewsCred took a further step toward the media big leagues with the acquisition of Daylife, a cloud service that offers publishing tools like image galleries, polls and timelines.

The deal creates a potent new platform for non-publishing brands to create content. The combined entity will be able, for instance, to offer a car or beer maker the ability to create an elegant news information site filled with timely content from professional news agencies. It also means NewsCred and its hundreds of partner news outlets have an opportunity to tap into Daylife’s client base which includes brands like the History Channel, GE, ESPN and Thomson Reuters.

Financial terms were not disclosed but NewsCred CEO Shafqat Islam said by phone that the acquisition would double the company’s customer and revenue base and that NewsCred would retain all Daylife staff.  He added that Daylife’s partnerships with image owners like Getty was a key part of the deal.

“Images drive websites, they’re what fuels the social web these days,” said Islam, noting that user-generated services like Instagram are typically insufficient for professional publishing.

The acquisition caps a remarkable year for NewsCred, which had to reinvent itself for the third time last November, after failing to find success as a consumer service. Since its relaunch as a digital newswire, the company appears to have hit on a niche — removing the technology and licensing friction between publishers and brands that want their content.

Asked about the future of NewsCred, Islam said further acquisitions or an IPO were far from his mind and that he is focusing instead on building the company. For now, NewsCred will focus on enterprise but Islam said down the road the company may consider offering slices of its portfolio to consumers or small businesses.

The company launched in 2008 and was supposed to help consumers find quality content but it stumbled, and only found success after it decided last year to target businesses instead. In practice, this means it has become a pure middleman, rounding up buckets of content and selling it not only to publishers but also to non-media brands like Orange or Johnson & Johnson.  Another client is entertainment app Fanhattan which uses NewsCred to offer a stream of movie and music related stories.

“All these companies have PR teams but they don’t have editors or journalists,” explains NewsCred CEO Shafqat Islam. “PR content loses authenticity.”

The game changer in NewsCred’s approach is technology. The company provides API’s that make it easy for any site to bake in its own newsfeed, but it also offers tools that help firms control the fire hose of content they purchase. This means sites can get a stream of automated, customized content; in the case of brands, the fire hose can also be tweaked to ensure damaging stories don’t appear in the mix. The other advantage to the middleman, of course, is easy licensing. Sites like NewsCred don’t just provide content but also offer a one-stop shop for copyright clearance.

News agencies themselves are also embracing the middleman approach, launching a licensing service called NewsRight. The outfit represents 27 major players, including the AP and the New York Times, and is targeted at clipping services that monitor and collect news for businesses or governments.

Unlike NewsCred, the news agencies’ operation has a coercive edge (NewsRight says it’s not a “litigation shop” but one of its lead members, the AP, is suing one aggregator that won’t buy a license). But at the same time, it’s offering a similar product — big buckets of cleared content and technology to track, manage and customize it.

The rise of these middlemen also coincides with the end of a misguided experiment in which some newspapers used a law firm to sue businesses and bloggers that pasted their articles. That experiment, involving a copyright troll called Righthaven, engendered deep bitterness among readers and landed the lawyers in hot water.

It remains to be seen whether the new middlemen will be able to tailor their product to a small business or consumer level (wouldn’t it be great if a local restaurant or hair salon could pay $10 a month to dress up its website with a smattering of Bloomberg or Guardian articles?). But for now it seems the rise of frictionless, customized news streams are a step in the right direction.