DEMOTIX: The citizen wire
16. July 2008 – 09:02 by Rolf LuehrsGetting rich while making the world a better place - this could be the mission of DEMOTIX Ltd. The company aims to be the first citizen wire, selling citizens generated photos & news to established media agencies.
The mission and business idea is based on the analysis that
- Only four US newspapers have foreign news desks (the NY Times, LA Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal), and there are only 141 US foreign correspondents currently working today (in print /and/ broadcast media)
- In the UK, a 2006 study of the broadsheets showed that more than 50% of the news was directly attributable to press releases
- The world’s media (over 90%) relies on the wire services – the Associated Press and Reuters – for their news. But some 80 countries, or 40% of the world’s nations, have no bureau from either agency.
DEMOTIX wants to close this gap by hosting citizen made photos, news and stories from all over the world on their website, trying to sell this stuff to mainstream media. The company keeps 50% of the revenues while passing on the other half to the authors.
Don’t know whether this will work, but I like the concept. What I do not like that much is that the people behind it stay almost anonymous. In the “about us” section nothing is said about who owns and leads the company.
It seems also a little exaggerated to hold out the prospects that participants will have the chance to earn up to 100.000 $ for exclusive material. How often will that be the case? Finally I recommend to read the terms of business carefully - although the company claims that the authors will retain the copyright, I am not quite sure if this is really the case.
It is, however, an interesting experiment and I am curious to see if DEMOTIX can make it.
Tags: citizen journalism
One Response to “DEMOTIX: The citizen wire”
By Madarász Csaba on Aug 2, 2008
I just think, this is some kind of trend, where media companies are building services, trying to involve citizens, as producers. CNN has recently launched https://www.ireport.com IREPORT, and there are I am sure, alternative ones in many countries now (we have also in Hungary - I was developing their video shooting tutorial ). But defenately, it says a lot, if there is not too much info about the company.