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Archive for the ‘Citizen Journalism’ Category

Amateur Photographers Get Professional Assignments Through Citizen Image

Monday, August 27th, 2007

Pioneering citizen photojournalism site lets commercial content buyers seek top quality images from millions of photographers around the world

NEW YORK, N.Y. — AUGUST 27, 2007

Citizen Image announced today the availability of its ciAssignment Board, a service allowing commercial content buyers from a wide variety of businesses – from news organizations to advertising agencies – to solicit and acquire submissions of photographs with specific, assigned content.
The ciAssignment Board, which has been in beta since early this year, provides commercial outlets a valuable resource for soliciting and acquiring images of breaking news events from camera-equipped bystanders, as well as specific stock images for commercial purposes.
To extend its reach, Citizen Image has struck several new business development deals including an agreement with Fotolog (www.fotolog.com), the world’s largest photo-blogging community and the third most actively-used social network on the Internet.
The Fotolog agreement allows its contributors to respond to Citizen Image’s assignment board requests within the Fotolog site, adding almost 10 million potential new photographers to Citizen Image’s reach.
Posting requests on the ciAssignment Board is open to any image buyer who creates a free account with the service.
The buyer sets the bounty and the outline of the request, and the responding photographer receives 50 percent of the gross proceeds each time their image is sold.
The ciAssignment Board has already successfully matched many top quality images from Citizen Image contributors with the requests of professional content buyers, providing income to Citizen Image contributors for their images.
Citizen Image users have been on the scene at important news events capturing pictures as news unfolds, beating professional photojournalists, sometimes by hours, who can only take pictures of the aftermath.
The ciAssignment board is available to anyone at: http://www.citizenimage.com/view_assignments.do.

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QUOTES

John Borthwick, CEO of Fotolog

“It’s not surprising that with so many affordable and high quality digital cameras available, there is a huge volume of really good pictures, many of which sit unshared on the photographers’ computers. We created Fotolog so that people interested in photography and proud of their pictures can network and share their pictures and experiences. Working with Citizen Image gives Fotolog users an easy way to profit from their creativity and share their work with a broader audience – all within the Fotolog platform.”

Kelly Kingman, photo editor of The Week

“New and affordable technology makes it possible for amateur photographers to capture high quality images, many of which are never seen outside of the photographer’s circle of friends. By reaching out to photo sharing sites and other news organizations, Citizen Image is helping photo editors find the best available photography, no matter what. Citizen Image is on the cutting edge of this new and important trend to find quality content from as many sources as possible.”

About Citizen Image
Citizen Image is an image agency that professionally represents photographic and video content of citizen photojournalists to editorial outlets around the world. Through Citizen Image, any photographer – professional or amateur – can offer his images for sale to media organizations by creating an account and uploading his content. Citizen Image allows news organizations to take advantage of camera-equipped bystanders who can take important pictures or video long before professional photojournalists can arrive on the scene. For more information visit www.citizenimage.com.

CONTACT INFORMATION

John Sidline (Agency)
Mobility Public Relations
+1-503-946-3311 (office)
drjohnnyspin (Skype)
Email: ci@mobilitypr.com
Web site: http://www.mobilitypr.com