Are you always on the go? Do you regularly find yourself in the midst of all the action in your town? If you're also taking great photos, capturing video footage or writing up quick explanations and putting them online, you've probably crossed the line into citizen journalism.
Whatever your motives for doing this, be it for sharing the news or for profit, you're going to want the process of sharing the news and circulating it to be as simple and hassle-free as possible. You'll also want it to be easy to arrange payment for your material, since your time is best spent documenting more news while you're there. With these things in mind, Citizenside [No Longer Available] was born.
Citizenside is designed to make it easy for photographers to submit newsworthy photos and videos and make them available for purchase by major news outlets. Citizenside does all the work finding buyers for your work - all you need to do is keep taking great photos and video footage.
How Citizenside Works
If you upload newsworthy photos or video footage to Citizenside, you automatically agree to give them a three month exclusive license to market those items to potential news outlets. This exclusivity means they can negotiate higher prices for your work and you get paid more.
If Citizenside don't think your photos or footage are "hot" they'll let you know within 48 hours and drop you to a non-exclusive license, selling from their image bank. This means you can also share or sell it elsewhere.
After 60 days, any royalties you have earned from your upload will be paid via PayPal. Royalties are between 50% and 65% of the price paid, which is a nice profit for someone who hasn't had to negotiate directly with the news outlets.
Citizenside will keep you informed of sales and negotiations as they take place.
Joining Citizenside
Users can either create an account with Citizenside or use a login from Facebook, Twitter, Google or other service to join. Either way will get you started in no time and it's completely free. You can immediately begin to upload photos and videos for sharing with news sources.
The quick sign-up is especially good news if you've just recorded a scoop on your phone and you're not yet signed up. Simply grab the Citizenside phone app, sign in with a pre-existing login and upload immediately.
Professional photojournalists are welcome to join Citizenside too. The royalties are the same, but if you're submitting quality photos and video regularly, it should add up.
Mobile Applications
Citizenside has iPhone and Android applications [No Longer Available] available so that you can upload your scoops as quickly as possible. You can also use the applications to see the news that is breaking and which events the news outlets require photos of urgently.
