By DAN MASON
As a regular cyclist around London, Turi Munthe knows a thing or two about getting from A to B without wasting time or money. And the risks involved.
So add some real entrepreneurial passion to a sound business sense and you have the former foreign correspondent behind one of the most promising media start-ups of the last couple of years: Demotix.
On one hand, Demotix (from the Greek for ‘of the people’; strapline: News by You) has built a fast-growing network of over 3,000 professional, seni-pro and amateur photographers around the world. It’s probably the most extensive photojournalism resource on the planet.
On the other, it combines the sale of news images with commissions from global news organisations, who get the benefit of a journalist on the spot … at a fraction of the cost of sending their own staffer.
The Demotix positioning is clever. Part agency; part freedom of information champion; part news website. Its smart widget, a live-updating slideshow of Demotix images, crops up in sidebars far and wide. Anyone can sign up for the free Demotix daily email service. And news organisations on the receiving end of the Demotix API include The Guardian and Aljazeera. It has a healthy presence on Facebook (4,274 likes) and Twitter (7,678 followers) too.
Demotix is also a good example of a lean, flexible media model. Cheap to run, easy to change.
It might just be significant that while Publish2 sees itself as the “Associated Press for the 21st Century”, Turi is describing Demotix as “the stringer’s AP.” Are we seeing a fundamental shift in the nature of news distribution? Very possibly.
And, as Turi explained to me when we caught up at the Frontline Club, there’s more just around the corner for Demotix. Here’s Turi on …
… the birth of Demotix
We’ve seen a major shrinkage in the way global news is covered. Many journalists have lost their jobs. This creates an ever-growing reliance on the two big news wires: Reuters and AP.
The problem is that AP and Reuters don’t have a single staffer in about 40 per cent of the world’s countries. So you end up with this absurd paradox, where there are more people trained than ever before; more and more people engaged in a global conversation about news and current events, yet the conversation in the mainstream media is ever-more restricted.
I wanted to create a platform for stringers and freelancers around the world (and would-be stringers and freelances; the dedicated amateurs and semi-pros) to tell their stories. Demotix is building an alternative global news source, bolstering the work of the big news wires, but also telling different kinds of stories
… how Demotix works
Demotix is essentially an open platform stringer network; we’re the stringer’s AP. People upload their stories on spec; thousands view it online; we take the best of that content and broker it to the mainstream media. At the same time, we offer assignments through our network. Demotix now has 3,000 active reporters in 190 countries around the world.
We receive regular requests from the big players, saying: ‘There’s something happening in Madagascar. Do you have anyone there?’ And, of course, the answer is always Yes. We had a request today for a series of portraits to be shot in Baghdad.
What we’re building is a very agile assignment network. And it’s this network of journalists that allows us to be able to offer mainstream players a bespoke news service.
We do follow mainstream news stories, but we also get stories no-one else would cover, from parts of the world where no big news organisation has had journalists for years.
… mixing professional and amateur journalism
We don’t recognise citizen journalism. What I see as citizen journalism is the random witnessing of an event by a man or woman in the street – and, yes, we’ve had some amazing content from people who just happened to stumble onto a story.
But the vast majority of the contributors to Demotix are very engaged in the whole newsgathering business. Why? because it’s a very difficult thing to do. Journalism may not have to be a profession, but it’s certainly a craft.
Professional photographers use Demotix as a showcase and an alternative way of brokering their work. We’re not in competition with professionals, but another string to their bow
… making money
We are on the way towards break-even and we see an ever-growing interest in the way we work.
Very simply, Demotix costs very little to run. We’re a very light HQ and all the work we do is on a variable cost model. So, for example, you submit a fantastic feature about cooking with lava in Iceland (a story we sold all over the world) – 50% sticks with Demotix and 50% comes back to you. If we don’t sell it, we don’t sell it. It costs us nothing to hold and it costs you nothing to upload.
It’s a model that speaks to the entrepreneurialism of the next generation of journalists, photojournalists and video journalists. It’s exactly how they will work; exactly how many already do work.
… the next steps for Demotix
Demotix will grow in media types – we’ve just launched video and that will be huge for us. We plan to bring on audio and then text.
We also plan to build on our bespoke news gathering network. And we’re going to move into the area of curating news content itself; packaging digital content for news organisations around the world.
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