Release Issued by Citizen Image:
Pioneering “citizen photojournalism” site lets commercial content buyers seek top quality images from millions of photographers around the world.
NEW YORK CITY – August 27, 2007 – Citizen Image, www.citizenimage.com, a leading citizen journalism photography agency, announced today the availability of its ciAssignment Board, a service that allows commercial content buyers from a wide variety of businesses – from news outlets to advertising agencies – the ability to solicit submissions of photographs with specific content. The ciAssignment Board, which has been in beta since the beginning of this year, provides commercial organizations a valuable resource for soliciting and acquiring specific images of breaking news events from camera-equipped bystanders, as well as specific stock images for commercial purposes. The ciAssignment Board has already successfully matched many top quality images taken by Citizen Image contributors with the requests of professional content buyers, paying photographers a fee whenever their pictures are sold.
To extend its reach, Citizen Image has struck business development deals with photography-based social networks in order to add more photographers and pictures to its service, increasing the volume of high quality images submitted for each assignment. Fotolog (www.fotolog.com), the world's largest photo-blogging community and the third most actively-used social network on the Internet, recently signed an agreement with Citizen Image to allow Fotolog’s contributors to respond to Citizen Image’s assignment board requests within the Fotolog site. This deal adds almost 10 million potential new photographers to the service’s reach. Fotolog plans to incorporate these hot news and stock image requests into their popular “photo hunt” and group message board features. The Fotolog community will then post and rate pictures in response to the Photo Hunt, and the top ranked images are either proactively pushed to news media outlets or submitted to the requestor by Citizen Image.
“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,” said Fotolog CEO John Borthwick. “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.”
Posting requests on the Citizen Image Assignment Board is open to any image buyer who creates a free account with the service. Once the Citizen Image buyer posts an assignment, that assignment is shared with the Citizen Image user community and its partners. The buyer sets the bounty and the outline of the request and the responding photographer receives 50 percent of the gross proceeds in the event their image is chosen.
Citizen Image has already successfully matched assignment board requests for ad agencies like GSD&M,and The Week Magazine. Kelly Kingman, photo editor of “The Week”, says she finds the Citizen Image assignment board a valuable bridge between the professional and the user-generated community:
"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."
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