Know anything about CitizenImage.com?

[photophorous]

I posted a question in another forum about getting freelance news photos published and someone suggested this site. www.citizenimage.com

It seems to be something like a stock agency, but they deal with time-sensitive news/editorial type photos, claiming to market the photos to publications for you. They take a 50% cut of anything sold, but they don't tell you how much the photos sell for. [Correction: I found the prices and they seem reasonable.]

Anyone know anything about this? Mostly, I'm wondering if publications would even use a site like this or if it would be considered too amateurish. They claim to work with professional photographers (as well as amateurs), but I'm skeptical.

Thanks,
Paul

[another view]

Time Magazine probably won't be looking there, but maybe some of the smaller magazines will. Here's the problem, and they do address it on their site - if you're shooting editorially there isn't much of a need for releases (I'm not a lawyer or a photojournalist, but that's my understanding). If you're a freelancer and selling the images, then it's a whole different thing. Here's what they have to say about it:

Does the image contain recognizable people or property (buildings, artwork)?

Answer
A. Yes - Do you have the appropriate model or property releases?

Yes? Select creative Royalty free license (this maximizes the amount of ways the image can be sold i.e. both for commercial and editorial use)
No? Select Editorial License. (Your image cannot be sold for commercial use if you don't have the release(s) that allows the model or property in your image to be associated with a product, service or company)

B. No - Select creative royalty free license. (Please note that your image can now be sold for both commercial (creative) AND editorial uses.

So that seems pretty limiting, assuming that RF is a lower price. How are you going to photograph an event and end up with interesting but unmanipulated images that don't show company logos (even bikes, team logos, etc) and without getting releases? They want Adobe 1998 jpegs...

I dunno. Sounds interesting but not for me. I've bought a couple copies of Photographer's Market in the past but never done anything with it. This might be a better plan...

[photophorous]

Hey Steve,

Thanks for looking at this and commenting.

I read that same passage before. I may be misunderstanding things, but aren't these guidelines representative of the laws I'd have to follow anyway? I mean, without a release, I can't sell a photo for commercial usage, no matter who's doing the selling, right? It doesn't matter who takes the photo, only what it's used for, so I should be governed by the same laws as a staff PJ at the local paper.

My biggest concern is that this place would be considered a joke and not actually help my resume/portfolio. I don't want to be associated with some scam website that annoys the crap out of all of the photo editors in my area. It doesn't really look that bad, but that's my concern.

I'm only considering this as a way to get published images in my portfolio, not so much a revenue generator (although they seem to pay better than some of the low-end stock places). I'm in one of those catch-22 situations where everyone wants to see a portfolio of published images before they will give you a chance.

Thanks,
Paul

[another view]

I may be misunderstanding things, but aren't these guidelines representative of the laws I'd have to follow anyway? I mean, without a release, I can't sell a photo for commercial usage, no matter who's doing the selling, right? It doesn't matter who takes the photo, only what it's used for, so I should be governed by the same laws as a staff PJ at the local paper.

From my understanding, yes, you're right. I think it's different if you work for a paper (example) and are shooting for them, but then you also don't own the rights to the images.

My biggest concern is that this place would be considered a joke and not actually help my resume/portfolio. I don't want to be associated with some scam website that annoys the crap out of all of the photo editors in my area. It doesn't really look that bad, but that's my concern.

I don't see much of a problem with that, actually. If it looks good to you, try it out and see if it leads to anything. If you get shots published because of it, it's working. The published shots can go into a portfolio, but you don't necessarily need to tell people looking at the portfolio exactly how the images got there. You could say a "stock agency" which this technically is.

[SmartWombat]

The UK has an agency called SCOOPT who recently made it onto CNN discussing the subject of citizen journalistic photography.
Scoopt are looking for news/editorial iamges, where I think the requirements for a release are different?

http://www.scoopt.com/pages/legalpics.aspx
http://www.scoopt.com/pages/terms.aspx

[photophorous]

I decided to give it a try. I uploaded 15 photos on Saturday that I took at an anti-war rally. No big loss if nothing comes of it. They were all accepted, although I'll be surprised if any sell. I'm sure there's no shortage of photos from war protests, but I thought it would be good practice to shoot it anyway. There were a lot of cameras there. I was pleasantly surprised to see so many college aged people with old manual film SLRs. There were a lot of digital cameras too, of course.

Thanks,
Paul