Citizen Image Blog

No Deal(s)......for now

2007-10-01T17:35:00.001-04:00

We've reached an impasse regarding any merger or acquisition deal(s) of which I spoke about in my last blog post.

So, with those discussions behind us, it is back to business as usual at CI. We are driving full steam ahead adding our editorial video application, news ticker and expanded assignment board features.

It's been amazing to see all of the inspiring images crossing through our editing queue in the past several months. Keep em' coming, we are closing in on over 8000 approved images uploaded within the past month!

In the mean time, keep those cameras at the ready.

Called Out

2007-09-20T12:10:00.000-04:00

I just got called out by one of our most prolific celebrity photographers, HughE Dillon for not updating our blog in over a month. When your right your right HughE. You can check out some of HughE great works here. HughE always seems to find himself around the celebrity action!

What have we been up to since we closed our partnership deal with Fotolog? One bit of news is as we announced our partnership deal with Fotolog, they announced they were being acquired by a French concern for a "large amount". Congrats to Adam, Rachel, Andrew and the rest of the folks at Fotolog! well deserved.

We have also finalized a deal with a "major distribution platform" to further our reach in maximizing your images when submitted to CI. We'll have the press release out on this in the coming weeks.
I can tell you, this platform is being used by the likes of Reuters, Getty AFP and other large media agencies looking to syndicate their quality content across many media outlets, so we are jazzed to have this deal signed.

Another bit of very, very interesting news is we've been approached about being acquired ourselves. We were approached about a month ago initially. Before we had time to mull this offer, we were approached by another media concern to act as the UGC platform to power all of their media properties from a user generated content perspective. Exciting times to be sure. So what we're going to do is take a deep breath, gather the troops and talk through the possibilities, strengths and weaknesses of each pending offer. Being part of a larger concern brings great possibilities......being part of a larger concern brings about great concern. More news to come on that in the coming weeks.

We'll keep every one posted on our on going progress regarding events, partners, acquisition discussions and added features.

In the mean time keep your camera at the ready!

Fight or Flight

2007-08-10T12:20:00.000-04:00

We had our fourth NY Citizen Journalism meetup and the sparks flew.

It seems Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, took a very dim view of having his thoughts on UGC challenged. So much so he decided to "leave" the meetup.

John Eischeid who was in attendance took the liberty of chronicling in his blog the chain of events that led to Andrew deciding to flee the meeting.
You never know what will happen at one of our meetups. We now have over 100 members, all with very passionate views on the state of UGC at work in the main stream. We encourage any one in the tri-state area interested in the UGC industry to join and attend our next meeting.

OK. What have we been up to of late? This past month of July has been a whirl wind of activity.

Here are a few of the key partnerships we put the finishing touches on:

The first partnership is with Ground Report where photographers can seamlessly upload images to the Citizen Image platform for marketing and sale. You can read all about this deal here.
We'd like to thank Rachel for all of her hard work in driving this deal home.

Secondly, we have signed a distribution agreement with Mochila. This allows us to broaden our market by opting in our images for sale via the Mochila marketplace. We went live two days ago. We are very much looking forward to working closely with the Mochila team.

And thirdly, we have signed a large content distribution deal with Fotolog. Fotolog represents 287 million images with over 10 million active photographers. With this executed agreement, Fotolog photographers will now be able to opt in their images for marketing and sale via the Citizen Image platform. In addition, and this is the really exciting part of this deal. All Fotolog photographers will be able to respond to our Assignment Board requests which we will posting on Fotolog's Fotohunt section. This feature enables our image buyers to post an assignment and have almost immediate fulfillment of their image requests. This is powerful!

We have a number of deals we are looking to put the finishing touches on with the likes of cell phone handset manufacturers, social media sites and photography sharing sites. We hope to have a number of these deals signed soon. In the mean time if you would like to partner with us drop us a line here.

In the mean time it's back to the salt mines!

Corbis' Microstock Offering

2007-06-29T11:15:00.000-04:00

Corbis came out with their microstock offering this week. Is this offering to little to late? Did they build a better mouse trap? Should they have bought an existing company instead of spending seven months re-inventing the wheel? In my mind they seem to be a date late and a dollar short.

I was reading Thomas Hawks blog this morning. I think he sums up very well UGC offerings such as Citizen Image and Zooomr vs the large "image" players of the world. Is an image of a sunflower on Getty really worth $300 when an image of a sunflower for sale at Citizen Image is $20-$60. We'll let you the readers and art buyers decide.

I mentioned a few weeks ago we've been working on putting the final touches on a few key partnerships.

We are pleased to announce to all Citizen Image photographers, that you will now be able to seamlessly import all of your images from Google Picasa to Citizen Image for sale! You'll no longer have to upload your images to both platforms. Log on to your CI account, go to your home page and you will see a Google Picasa tab. Click on the tab and follow the instructions.

We are also working on a number of deals involving thirty image sharing and social networking sites which will allow their users to opt in content for sale via the Citizen Image platform. We're confident that by this time next week we will have add'l key announcements, so stay tuned.

Don't forget to check out our assignment board. There are a few plum assignments from national magazines that need your great shots for use on their covers.

Citizen Image, Empowering the new mass media.

What's with the CEO at Zooomr?

2007-06-05T14:10:00.000-04:00

Just reading Valleywag. It seems our man at Zooomr was raging drunk(2 bottles of wine) yesterday on a discussion board with some of the members of flickr?! What up with that? I guess Zooomr is being accused of stealing and replicating flickr code. Stealing code and Zooomrs's site is still not working right, yeeesh. They'll figure it out.........moving on.

Two weeks ago we had the pleasure of meeting Alan Meckler at a little coffee shop on the upper east side. It was quite illuminating to speak with an icon in the image business and get his take on the state of the state regarding UGC, RF, RM, images and 2.0 in genreral. We also discussed living through 1.0 and some of the wacky start-ups that were getting funded and are no longer with us, ah good times.

Some of our upcoming announcements in the coming weeks will revolve around Picasa, Ground Report, and our good friends over at a "large" photo sharing site. Keep your eyes peeled for these upcoming announcements!!

And for petes sake keep those cameras at the ready to capture the next UGC editorial image!!!

Citizen Image, empowering the new mass media.

Citizen Image UGC Wire Service

2007-05-31T12:22:00.000-04:00

Another great week here at CI albeit a short one.

We have signed a number of great partnerships over the past nine months and are on track to sell more newsworthy images this quarter than in any of our past Q's.

We are jazzed by the forward momentum and the on going adoption by tradional media outlets in embracing/purchasing timely UGC editorial images.

With that said, we are entering a pivotal moment in our eveloution. Our goal and focus long term has always been to develop the first UGC wire service. This morning we took a GIANT step forward in executing on this idea!

I can't give to much detail on our meetings over the past weeks, but this morning all of our past efforts culminated in an audience with fifteen of the largest media players in one room.

Suffice to say, It is my hope in the coming two weeks we will have an important annoucement to make regarding our UGC Wire Service efforts.

Again, we thank all of our contributors for their on going support, recommendations, and fantastic images. We stand in awe of your photographic talents and ability to capture news events as they happen long before local media has time to arrive. Keep up the great work!

Meetup on Citizen Journalism

2007-05-18T14:43:00.000-04:00

Forgot to mention we had a good write up in Killer Startups

On Wednesday we had our 2nd Citizen Journalism meetup. There were a number of no shows due to the crazy storm we had in NYC, never the less we had a lively debate, discussion and outcome from the members who attended.

The moderators this week were Mike Myers from Nowpublic, Jason Breed from Neighborhood America. and Pancho Bernasconi from Getty Images. Plenty of lively debate revolved around our topics which covered editorial bias, monetization of content, and business strategy around UGC. I want to thank every one for their active participation. We look forward to a larger turn out for our June Meetup.

Off the road and back in the saddle

2007-05-17T17:15:00.000-04:00

Feargall and I have been on the road for the better part of April till now on or VC road show.

I can say with out a doubt that VC's are some of the most interesting people you will ever meet. We had the opportunity to meet with a total of twenty venture capitalists in the NY and Boston area. With out spilling the beans to much here we are done with the tour and back to being 100% focused on Citizen Image and how we can make Citizen Image the market leader in UGC photojournalism distribution.

I'll comment tomorrow on what we have in store regarding add'l features, etc. In the mean time, it is great to be back in the saddle and focused on CI!

-joe

Citizen Journalism at work

2007-04-16T18:37:00.000-04:00

Sadly, the first thing I noticed when I turned the news on tonight was the impact of citizen journalism at work. All the major networks used cell phone footage- video and still to help tell the story of today's tragic shootings at Virginia Tech University.

The New York Citizen Journalism Meetup

2007-04-16T09:59:00.000-04:00

We launched our first Meetup last week. We had quite the turn out from traditional media outlets along with some of the newer stand outs in Citizen based journalism.
Read below as we recap the fantastic events of last week.

Firstly, thanks for all who attended last night. In the room we had AP, Associated Content, Aurora, ABC News, urbis, NY Times, Metro Newspapers, Nowpublic, Newassignment.net, PDN, groundreport, citizen Image, neighborhood america, mogulus to name, well, quite a few, and a few citizen journalists.

Jay Rosen gave us a rundown of his Newassignment.net site and his assignment zero initiative- what worked, what didn't, how important it was to "right size" the assignment for participation. He also touched on how they approached editing and refining the submitted content to create the final product (which in the case of assignment zero is a major article for wired magazine and a shorter version to be posted on the web). Next up for them is a crowdsourcing initiative around writing about each of the presidential candidates and their campaigns.

Owen from ABC talked about their approach to seeding content using the most popular pro stories on the day as a guide for what to request of citizens. Steve from Urbis explained their peer review system. There was some healthy debate (andrew from Associated content and Jay fromNew assignment.net) on incentives (getting paid for particpating versus public good ).

Thoughts on where to take the meetup from here..

1. Have a theme. Elliot from the NY times suggested using the Presidential race as a case study throughout but others suggested mixing that up every meetup.
2. Have up to three people present / demo their offering each meetup. Andrew from AC suggested an alternative way to divide the discussions or break up the presentations - a. The content providers. b. The Public (the readership or the beneficiaries) c. The business side of things (company and advertisers). It was decided that we would use the messageboard for people to request to speak.
3. Noel from Newassignment.net suggested we eventually start to create a "barcamp" - sort of a think in where people can branch off into different areas - eg concerns of contributors (copyright etc), monetizing cit-journalism, attracting contributors. He promises to explain more to me about how these barcamp things work next week so apologies if I haven't described it accurately.

There was some back and forth on how do best embrace the "pros" and the citizen journalists in the same meetup and make it relevant and interesting for both. Jay suggested we focus the meetup and the topics discussed around the "practice" of citizen journalism which is a clever way to guide the discussions and embrace both sides of the house - those producing the content and those soliciting it.

Overall, it seemed like it was a useful event, a lot of good contacts were made and we have a solid basis to move forward. Now if only the next time the organizer can get the address right!

The New York Citizen Journalism Meetup

2007-03-26T10:58:00.000-04:00

Looking for other like minded citizen journalists/photo journalists? Join the new New York Citizen Journalism Meetup. "Meet other local people interested in all aspects of citizen journalism -we are looking for active and budding citizen journalists (text, photo and video), entrepreneurs in the space and big and small, for-profit and not-for-profit, media houses or social networking services who are current running or are interested in building citizen Journalism or related initiatives."

Workshops and Contests

2007-03-22T21:19:00.000-04:00

Sony sponsors two day workshops throughout the US. Learn more about what your camera can do (and you can do with your camera) in Minneapolis, Miami, Dallas, Atlanta, Westchester County or San Francisco. More dates and locations to be added throughout the year.

Popular Photography magazine sponsors a monthly contest as well as keeps tabs on other photography contests.

Photo Contest and Citizen Media in the News

2007-03-16T15:14:00.000-04:00

Intercontinental Insights announces a photo contest. Check their site beginning March 21st, 2007.

2007-03-16T15:03:00.000-04:00

BusinessWeek is not sure that local sites offering citizen generated media can work. Backfence (the company mostly referred to in this article) did not have a wide market- offering local sites in a few DC, IL and CA suburbs - many of which already have a local paper of sorts. One anecdote does not make a trend.

Citizen Image announces deal with PixPulse

2007-03-15T14:19:00.000-04:00

Pixpulse users may now sell their newsworthy photos, text and video content through Citizen Image's platform. When uploading their content to Pixpulse, users will be able to choose to upload their content to Citizen Image, which will in turn offer the images for sale. Users will receive a share of profits of any sales generated. Citizen journalism is enjoying a surge of popularity. As Citizen Image CEO, Feargall Kenny, said "Because no news organization can plan to cover news events they cannot anticipate, increasingly they are embracing 'citizen journalism' content in all its forms--text, images and video."

Citizen Image releases ciSyndicate

2007-03-12T17:53:00.000-04:00

"Citizen Image(TM) (www.citizenimage.com) today announced the availability of ciSyndicate(TM), an innovative platform that transforms the millions of people who share pictures over social networks and photo sharing websites into an instant corps of citizen photojournalists. ciSyndicate is a web-services based solution for these social network websites that seamlessly lets its users opt-in their photography and video content for sale by Citizen Image to photo editors and media buyers around the world."

Getty Images enters the Citizen Marketplace

2007-03-12T16:00:00.000-04:00

Getty Images announced today (March 12) that they have purchased Scoopt, the Scottish based citizen photojournalism site. The purchase and Getty's entry into the citizen-based photography market will bring a new validity to the trend. Expect to see more and more main-stream media using citizen generated photos.

An interesting twist

2007-03-07T12:11:00.000-05:00

The French government has banned the reporting of violence by citizen journalists. Interestingly, they are considering legislation to give some kind of certification to websites, bloghosts, and other purveyors of media. Reporters Without Borders is concerned that the certification could be a threat against citizen journalism.

Thanks Ed for the heads up!

Photo Contest

2007-03-02T12:37:00.000-05:00

Caribbean Travel & Life is looking for your best photos taken in the Caribbean, Bahamas or Bermuda. Deadline is June 8th. Contest is open only to amateur photographers. (Those who make less than 10% of their income from photography)

Citizen Image: The Interview

2007-02-24T16:58:00.000-05:00

606Tech recently interviewed Citizen Image co-founder, Joe Bransom.

Associated Press Joins the Citizen Journalism Crowd

2007-02-12T16:31:00.000-05:00

AP announced on Friday that they closed a deal with citizen generated site NowPublic.com. NowPublic's content will be joining AP's professional stream of material.

Citizen Journalism - In the News

2007-02-05T22:48:00.000-05:00

When I first read that not only was Rush Limbaugh being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, but that he was considered by some to be the "father" of Citizen Journalism, I double-checked to make sure that I was not reading The Onion. I am still not convinced this was a real story. However, the HinzSight Report seems convinced.

Personally, I think I prefer the idea that citizens were the basis for professional journalism.

And on the photo side of things, I noticed that the most recent issue of "Life and Style Weekly" just ran a blurry, pixilated camera phone photo of Britney Spears with her baby Jayden. Time was when a photo editor wouldn't look twice at a shot like that. My suspicion is that big bucks were paid for that photo.

Citizen Journalism - In the News

2007-01-22T21:14:00.000-05:00

The Ventura County Star has added a new feature called YourHub where the citizens of Ventura County may add their own news or even OpEd pieces.

The Washington Post invited anyone with a DC oriented blog to come to Post headquarters on January 9th and discuss ways to collaborate with the newspaper. The Post is willing to funnel ad revenue over to the bloggers when appropriate.

Deloitte's Media Predictions of 2007 says that citizen generated content "may offer more of an opportunity than a threat" to main stream media.

The Pasadena Weekly claims that the age of citizen journalism is upon us. I think I've seen this story elsewhere as well.

USC Annenberg's Online Journalism review says "Let's quit arguing the merits of "mainstream" versus "citizen" journalism and instead work together on "better" journalism."

And the Electric News Network tells us that the mobile phone spurs citizen journalism.

Buzzword

2007-01-18T21:42:00.001-05:00

Citizen journalism is the buzz word du jour. Obviously we feel strongly about it. And why not? As many photographers and journalists are out there in the world, they can't be everywhere at once. As the trend grows, I suspect we will see some journalists protesting - after all they went to college for 4+ years to learn all about writing or taking photos. How does the average citizen guarantee to be unbiased? With Adobe Photoshop and similar programs available, how do we know the photo is genuine and not altered? The truth is, we don't. However, I think the course of citizen journalism will be self-correcting. If too many altered pictures come to light, the media and the public will no longer accept it. And believe me, altered photos may be published, but it will be a rare one that isn't exposed eventually.

The originality of our news and photos has fast been disappearing over the past few years. When you pick up your hometown newspaper - how many articles have been gleaned from the Associated Press or Reuters? When you look at the weekly magazines at the supermarket, how many identical photos do you see in different magazines from the same large conglomerate photo agencies? The first time you see the Golden Globes dress review, maybe you care. By the time you've seen it in the 7th magazine?

Tonight, the places to be for a photographer are in Park City, Utah at the Sundance Film Festival, at the premiere of "Breaking or Entering" in New York or in Los Angeles, your pick of the premieres of "Funny Money" or "Smokin' Aces". At any one of these events, there are between 30-60 photographers. Imagine being the photo editor looking through 100 or more photos from each of these photographers tomorrow morning. Now imagine being the photo editor and seeing that great shot of ______ (fill in the blank). That there is only one of, because Joe/Jane Smith - Citizen at Large - was the only one on the scene. Which photo are you going to use?

Money, Money, Money

2007-01-17T00:03:00.000-05:00

Participatory news network- NowPublic.com offers up prizes for the most newsworthy citizen generated photos.

Get your photo published in jpg magazine, win $100 and get a year subscription. What's not to love?

And of course! The Citizen Image Assignment Board. Check out our assignments- maybe something you've shot recently fits the bill? Maybe you live across the street from one of the location assignments? Send in your photos and we will get them to the editors.