AFP invests in citizen journalism

Another news site based on citizen journalism accepted an investment offer from a global mainstream medium, AFP.

Scooplive relaunched on November 29 with a new name, Citizenside, and money from AFP.

What is Citizenside?

CitizenSide was created in 2006 in Paris, France, by three founders, Julien Robert, Philippe Checinski and Matthieu Stefani. Julien took responsibility for website creation in terms of technology and Philippe had specialty in finance and marketing.

It was Matthieu who had something to do with journalism. He was part of the team that has launched the successful free daily newspaper Metro in France and joined the HQ of Metro International in London.

CitizenSide is such a platform where anyone can participate with his or her own news contents as Ohmynews in Korea (Even its motto With Scooplive, we are all reporters! reminds me of that of Ohmynews Every citizen is a reports).

It introduces itself as “the first photo and video scoop marketplace on the Internet” and aims at creating the world's largest amateur and/or independent reporters community with a commercial goal.

How it works?

If citizens send in photos and videos, Citizenside offers them to journalists worldwide who have already signed up for the site. There are two ways of distributing the citizen contents.

If the content is a scoop, it is auctioned off on the website and sold to the highest-bidding media in each participating country, who benefits from a 30-day exclusivity.

If the content is an interesting current news document, it is on sale on the site’s image bank at a fixed rate, and is available to media all over the globe.

Each reporter or seller retains the copyright of his photos. He grants the buyers a license to use his material and grants Scooplive a license to market them. The seller earns up to 85% on the final sale price of his documents.

Why AFP invests in Citizenside?

According to the AFP statement, the French news agency bought a 30 percent stake in Citizenside and will not take part in its editorial decisions.


AFP hopes this investment will allow it to get closer to readers and to bring the contents produced by citizens to its news media customers.

Pierre Louette, President of AFP, said: “This is for us a purely commercial and technical experiment in the Web 2.0 field, to help our clients, mainly in the media field.”