Citizen Image Creates Global Corps of Photojournalists

NEW YORK - Citizen ImageTM has announced the availability of ciSyndicateTM, an innovative platform that transforms the millions of people who share pictures over social networks and photo sharing websites into an instant corps of citizen photojournalists. ciSyndicate is a web-services based solution for these social network websites that seamlessly lets its users opt-in their photography and video content for sale by Citizen Image to photo editors and media buyers around the world.

“You can never know exactly where or when something compelling or newsworthy will happen,” said Dave Boyle, photo editor at the New York Post newspaper. “It’s important to be open to receiving images from new, non-traditional sources. Citizen Image is an exciting source that the New York Post has used to good effect. One great exclusive picture we purchased from Citizen Image was taken by an amateur photographer who got a very funny shot of ‘Borat’ climbing out of the trunk of a New York City cab.”

ciSyndicate is an easy to install solution for social networking sites that lets Citizen Image harvest user-generated content and stream it into their content syndication portal. Once users opt-in their original photographic or video content, Citizen Image professionally represents it to news and creative services organizations globally. Users are paid for pictures that are sold, and both the social network and Citizen Image receive a fee.

PixPulse (www.pixpulse.com) of Seattle, Wash. and Photagious (www.photagious.com) of Covington, KY are the first two photo sharing social network sites to adopt the ciSyndicate platform. The inclusion of the image content from both these sites can quickly add as many as 100,000 new images to Citizen Image’s content repository as PixPulse and Photagious members opt-in their pictures.

“We believe in pushing the envelope with innovative features for the users of PixPulse.com,” said David Xue, CEO of PixPulse. “PixPulse wants to empower each of our 300,000 members that capture a valuable and newsworthy image or take that great creative shot to do more than just share that content with friends. Our partnership with Citizen Image gives our users a simple method to earn money for their pictures. The monetization of Web 2.0 has begun and PixPulse is embracing money-making options for our user base.”

Beyond the ability for Photagious users to syndicate their content for sale via Citizen Image, members of the Photagious portal will also have the opportunity to respond to the Citizen Image assignment board where professional photo editors go to solicit image content for editorial and creative projects.

“Major news can happen when it’s least expected, making it impossible to plan on photographing it,” said Feargall Kenny, CEO at Citizen Image. “Yet every day there are literally millions of people around the world carrying digital cameras and camera phones who will be bystanders to history. In the past, the most these amateur photographers could hope to do was to share their pictures with friends. Citizen Image is a conduit between these important images and the people who need them and are willing to buy them.”

Citizen Image has been representing and selling “citizen photojournalist” content since June 2006, and the Citizen Image online portal went live in October. In many instances Citizen Image users have been on the scene at important news events capturing pictures as news unfolds, beating professional photojournalists, sometimes by hours, who can only take pictures of the aftermath. Citizen Image also represents creative images to advertising agencies and other creative services bureaus.