'Love Match' of pro-democracy and cit-j site to reinvigorate reporting

Posted by Christie Silk on May 19, 2009 at 11:26 AM

Demotix, the citizen journalism agency and openDemocracy, an open-sourced news site have agreed a new partnership, reports journalism.co.uk. openDemocracy will carry the Demotix widget and run its pictures alongside their stories and analysis.

The arrangement is a "perfect synergy" according to the Demotix announcement, "on the one hand, oD's razor-sharp, individual textual analysis, and on the other, Demotix's collective, collaborative visual representation of the world. Opposites attract".

Editor-in-chief of openDemocracy Tony Curzon Price, commenting on the Demotix site, echoed the sentiment "we're rebuilding the media, piece by piece - Demotix's citizen journalist collective and openDemocracy's open-source analysis and commentary will bring new media and new models into a mixture of text and picture that is not just a replacement, but better than what came before".

The two sites share a fundamental ethos: open participation and comment with a global reach. openDemocracy functions on contributions from experts and on the ground witnesses, funded by its charitable status, a number of Trust Foundations and individuals. Demotix, founded in September 2008, works by taking user-generated content and photographs from amateurs and freelancers and marketing them to mainstream media agencies. 70 per cent of any fee charged is given back to the original providers of the material.

The partnership will run along the existing lines of participation. Demotix CEO Turi Munthe assured contributors that openDemocracy "can't re-licence any Demotix material without pre-negotiating payment terms with us'.

This fusion of expert analysis and citizen journalism is perhaps a solution to a very current problem: the current insufficiencies in the provision of around-the-clock global information by the limited number of foreign desks and correspondents held by the print and broadcast media.

Indeed, the financial benefits of using citizen photojournalism have been recognized by mainstream news organizations. The My Space and Fox News initiative, uReport and the cooperation between Agence France Press and Citzenside indicates the future potential of collaboration between citizen and professional providers of news and images.

Source: journalism.co.uk