Kay Fenech: Demotix

Demotix

"Photos from Iranian citizen journalists... mark a coming of age"

"Offers aspiring journalists a chance"

"lives at the intersection of professional and citizen journalism"

"gives locals a chance to report from their own perspective"

"a pretty interesting approach to reinventing the newswire"

“Demotix was founded on the cross-roads of activism and journalism, with two principles in mind
– freedom of speech and freedom of information.”

I have recently been introduced to Demotix, a very contemporary way of news delivery. Fundamentally Demotix delivers its news through civilian journalists situated all around the world. The organisation has over 25,000 users and 4,500 video and photojournalists, whose stories are uploaded to the website to tell a story and if the work is compelling and good it has the potential to be sold to other media agents, at which the civilian journalist will receive 50% of the price paid for the work, which Demotix keep the other 50%. This type of journalism is intriguing and I have decided to take a deeper look into how it works and the standards of this organisation.

Demotix prides itself in bringing forward freedom of speech and freedom of the press by allowing everyone to be a part of news reportage. The organisation also takes credit for exposing stories which we would not normally hear about. For one because they are in areas of the world which our general media does not usually cover and it also gives the opportunity for stories to be released where the press was not able to access however civilians were.

Anyone can be a part of Demotix, one must simply understand the standards of the work expected. All photographs sent in must be Jpegs and at least 5 megapixels. Videos may be any size however if larger than 60MB, Demotix request the use of the FTP method for faster uploading. There are to be no watermarks or Logos on the images uploaded for Demotix, any images with markings will not be bought by other media companies. Nor should there be any timestamps which is a mark on the photograph indicating the time and date the image had been taken. It is however important that the camera’s time and date settings are correct, this is in order to maintain validity. Negative scans are also able to be uploaded as well as old images a user may have, with a story. One must not rotate the image prior to uploading, Demotix will deal with this. Demotix make it clear that they do not use any editing software what so ever, in fact they do not even crop the images, despite this, if your images are sold to newspaper agents, they will have the write to crop the image or use some lightening and contrast tools. The images should have captions, captions are important. They should also be accompanied with media summaries. The media summaries concern what the photograph is about, when did this happen? Where did it happen? What happened? Why and how did this happen? Using key words will help your image be found. The type of stories Demotix are after for publishing are breaking news, features, sports politics and documentary.

In regard to sales, Demotix has three methods of selling. One is ‘Direct Sales’, in which the company markets the images to an array of publishers, broadcasters, NGO’s and design agencies. Every week Demotix also chooses between ten and twenty images to be displayed in the Demotix Widget for four days, if your image is selected for the Widget you will receive £12.50.

Demotix additionally has a deal with Corbis, in which Corbis may buy any images sent over from Demotix and the price paid will be split 50/50 with the journalist and Demotix. Additionally Demotix continues to license images directly to all our main news clients (Guardian, Wall Street Journal, News International, Telegraph, etc...), our main NGO clients (Amnesty, ActionAid, WaterAid...), and our direct clients (GlobalVoices, OpenDemocracy, etc...).

Resellers are also used, this is so that the images have the best accessibility possible due to the fact that Demotix as of yet do not have sales people everywhere. Their current resellers are Corbis and Daylife, who keep a small percentage of the revenue, the rest is again split 50/50 between Demotix and the journalist involved.
What kind of news is Demotix interested in?

Current events

When people think of news, they usually think of the stories and photographs which will appear on today's newspaper front-pages - a significant occurrence which is ongoing or recent. News is often new to people.

Local perspective

But it doesn't have to be front-page stuff. Some of the best images are of subjects of interest to a specific or localized audience.

Features

It doesn't have to be breaking events. Demotix also wants to see photographs which explore unreported issues.

Demotix, the citizen-wire