Financial Review offers text and data mining to business subscribers

Nathan Jolly

November 11, 2025 10:14

Financial Review offers text and data mining to business subscribers

All this delicious data can be yours to mine

The Australian Financial Review will be offering its business subscribers the rights to mine its text and data, as part of a rebranded B2B offering.

The Nine-owned masthead will rebadge its corporate subscriptions to Financial Review for Business with a suite of new products that its press release said “signals a major commitment to meeting the efficiency and integration demands of a modern, technology-driven workflow, equipping Australia’s key decision makers with the information they need to make informed strategic decisions in a dynamic market”.

To this end, the AFR will launch custom API feeds that deliver the paper’s content directly into existing client workflows. Another feature is the provision of text and data mining rights, which Nine said “is unique among major publishing news outlets in Australia.”

Mumbrella understands the TDM rights is an optional add-on functionality available exclusively to clients who hold a company-wide Financial Review for Business enterprise license. It is available at an additional, separate fee.

James Chessel, editor in chief of The Australian Financial Review, said in a media release that the masthead’s new business offering is designed to help businesses “move decisively and confidently with the necessary speed, precision, and clarity the market demands.”

James Chessell wants AFR readers to move decisively and confidently

Agos Garola, director of B2B subscriptions and licensing, called it “a strategic step forward, acknowledging how quickly the Australian workplace is changing.

“Our focus is on innovation, quality and control – maximising the utility and value of our content by offering enterprise subscribers new ways to integrate AFR intelligence into their existing technology for an indispensable edge.”

In August, the Productivity Commission released a report that floated the idea of a text and data mining exception for the Australian Copyright Act, making it legal to train AI large-language models on copyrighted Australian material as part of the “fair dealing” exceptions.

In the report, it was estimated that a potential A$116 billion would be added to the Australian economy over the next ten years if such exceptions were added to the Copyright Act.

If such amendments were made, copyright holders would see no financial recompose for their intellectual property.

Various industry bodies hit out at the idea, with The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance calling the proposal “a blueprint for the wholesale theft of Australia’s art, media, and cultural heritage that will do nothing more than further enrich the billionaires in Silicon Valley”.

The Albanese Government quickly ruled such an amendment out, saying it “stands behind Australia’s creative industries and, by ruling out a text and data mining exception, is providing certainty to Australian creators.”

News Corp Australia’s executive chairman Michael Miller also slammed the idea during the company’s half-yearly earnings call, saying: “Australia’s copyright laws are enforceable and fit-for-purpose to protect intellectual property in the age of AI.”

In May 2024, News Corp signed a “historic, multi-year agreement” deal with OpenAI that allows the company to use the publisher’s news reporting and archive of content in order to train LLMs.