Publishers Professional Indemnity Insurance Explained

As a publisher, you need to ensure your policy includes defamation, intellectual property, and breach of confidentiality.

So, defamation, the policy should include if you damage a third party’s reputation. That’s probably the most likely claim you will get.

Uh intellectual property. So that should include copyright allegations that you’ve copied a  third party’s material and published it.

And finally, confidentiality. If you publish uh content without the permission of third parties, that also needs to be included within your policy.

So they price your policy based on the risk of your content. So, if I put this  into context, if you’re publishing an educational magazine, the content is relatively low risk in the insurers’s eyes. Whereas, if you’re publishing a gossip or a a a feature magazine, which um potentially mentions celebrities, that’s a higher risk. So, the  insurers will charge a higher premium.

Next, they will look at circulation. So, is your magazine going to be circulated once a month to 5,000 people, or is it going to be circulated every single day to hundreds of thousands of people? If it is, the policy with the largest circulation will will carry a higher a higher price.

Uh finally, the insurers look at your experience and whether you have an in-house legal team or whether you refer to  third party legal team. Especially if you’re publishing highly contentious content, you need you need to demonstrate to the insurers that you’ve got the necessary experience to check what you you’re publishing and check that it doesn’t defame or or offend a third party.

The last thing we would advise a publisher is to double check that their policy includes both physical print and also digital print. With with websites and content  going viral, it’s absolutely critical that your policy, it’s very clear within your policy that  you’re covered for your digital and online exposures.