Will mainstream media pay citizen journalists?

Although the trend now seems to be that news outlets are happy to refer to and use citizen content for free as seen in Hurricane Katrina and the London bombings, in an insightful essay at Poynter, Outing says that this won't last forever.

"While most citJ content will remain uncompensated -- because its quality isn't high enough to get anyone to pay for it -- the best of it will have a price tag. And publishers may have to adapt to paying for it." 

According to Outing, the first type of content that news organizations will begin paying for is photos. He cites the emergence of websites that collect images from everyday people and try to sell them to news outlets.

So far, these ventures have had very few revenue producing sales. But each are experimenting with distinct business models that offer contributors various means of delivering their images and news organizations different ways of finding the image they're looking for.

When it comes to the best citizens contributions about relevant stories, Outing says that news organizations would be "naive" to think that people will just be giving their material away. He lists some suggestions for MSM looking to incorporate citizen contributions: 

• Monitor the new news agencies that are starting to trade in citizen content
• When a big story breaks, be prepared to pay
• Identify your best citizen contributors and figure out how to compensate them
• Consider non-cash compensation
• Run contests and award the best submissions
• Link content placement and payment
• Work hard on finding a viable citJ business model

The relationship between the MSM and their readers is sure to expand in this manner as news organizations grow to accept the value of eye-witness material. But citizens may eventually work around the MSM and still be able to turn a bit of a profit with their content.

Candids of celebrities, already rampant and of fairly shoddy quality, will most likely continue to attract top-dollar so any citizens with interesting photos of famous people should keep selling them to celebrity magazines.

But images of breaking news may not receive the compensation they deserve, especially in the face of shrinking news budgets at large organizations.

Instead, someone with exclusive photos of an important event may simply want to put the pictures up on her own blog. In order to make money, advertisers could be quickly solicited with the promise of traffic to the blog and advertising rates could be increased periodically as long as the news is relevant, a sort of fluctuating rate scale (obviously accompanied by Google Ads or like services).

If the pictures are there, instead of buying the photos, news organizations could link their coverage of the event to the blog where the pictures are and vice-versa, increasing traffic to both sites and making advertisers for both happier. 

If this business model were ever to take off, it wouldn't necessarily be the news organizations searching for and paying for citizen content. Rather advertisers may find themselves looking for hot sites and bidding for advertising space.

Source: Poynter