Comments on: Needed: Real-Time Media Auction System

By: Dan Gillmor

Dan Gillmor — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 22:43:56 +0000

Matt, thanks for letting me know about your project. It’s another fascinating effort in this field.
Tim, while I admire what Demotix is doing (and have since that meeting in London a while back), I don’t follow the logic that you’re like a private auction. You are brokers, which is not at all the same thing.
Craig, I also tend to think that the stories involving danger are best left to people who are being paid to take risks. But we’d not hear about a lot of things we do hear about if they were the only ones exposing wrongdoing.

By: Craig

Craig — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:35:03 +0000

Great idea and I have to agree the current model won’t last for long. As the internet matures and people get over the thrill of seeing their name on a website then news organisations are going to have to get most realistic in their policies.

I also agree that while Nowpublic and Demotix are great ideas they can’t continue indefinitely in their current form. Nowpublic’s lack of editorial control is turning the site into a platform for right wing nuts and conspiracy theorists. When the front page story is some crazy piece about FEMA setting up concentration camps in America using German troops then you know the writing is on the wall.
On the other hand Demotix is quite happy to suggest people go out on life threatening assignments without even the faintest guarantees they even get paid. I got an email from them suggesting stories which included Greece’s s@x trade, which is controlled by crime syndicates to a large extent. A photographer taking on such a task would be exposing themselves to all kinds of possible dangers.

By: Tim Saunders

Tim Saunders — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:04:37 +0000

Dan,
Demotix works just like an auction, albeit a private one. When we have time-sensitive, breaking news story, we go directly to multiple clients and and broker the best deal we can for the contributor. That’s for exclusives.

For non-exclusives, we run on industry-standard rates. There’s no haggling – our street reporters get the same as any ‘pro’. The big issue we see, as new entrants into the picture space, is how spectacularly diverse global practices are. Some outfits self-bill, others run on subscriptions, there’s no universal system to understand who’s using what, and all the agencies function with different tech.

As a friend of ours put it – the picture industry is a multi-billion dollar cottage industry. It drives everyone insane, and it’s ripe for rationalising.

By: Matt Stefani

Matt Stefani — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:26:01 +0000

Hi Dan, Thanks for your interesting post. Citizen Testimony (probably not 'journalism' as we hear quite a lot, when we talk about images) is going really big as we talk, and you're a very good inspiration for us since a few years now. My name is Matthieu Stefani, I am one of Citizenside.com cofounders, we have created our agency in France back in 2007 with AFP (Agence France Press, owns 34%), based on our 2 years experience on Citizen Tesimonies with Scooplive our previous project. We work with a few of the largest French Media houses as partners, and are growing very fast in the past months. The original project was born in 2005 under the brand Scooplive.com and we have launched this auction system back in 2006! I can tell you that even for the best pictures and videos, media houses weren't keen to come on an "editor's ebay like". It was quite dispointing for us, but it seems that our clients like good old 'phone bidding system', and when it's the ones who have the biggest money... it's a big problem for the document price, that are sold way under the real value. It might be worth trying again soon, but most of our docs can be sold on a non exclusive basis and for the ones that should be exclusive, as good professionnals (or trying our best), we know who to talk to and how to create the value around. I'm not sure you've heard about us before, we should will focus more on the international market now... we're getting there with EditorsWeblog here and Journalism.co.uk here ... I'd be very happy to talk anytime you have time for a 'talk over beers', I've heard it's the new fashion. Cheers, M/