Picture This: How Images from Gaza got from Ordinary People to Us
Demotix citizen journalists in Gaza sent images of things inaccessible to journalists (Eman Mohammed/Demotix)
As the bombardment of Gaza began last month, an Israeli media blackout denying journalists access to the Strip held firm. And yet, global criticism of Israeli action crescendoed as image after heartbreaking image was published in the media.
As there were no – or very few – journalists in Gaza, the images of the carnage often came from ordinary people. Many reached the world via a new website: Demotix.com.
This London-based company has created considerable buzz by allowing anyone to upload their pictures of anywhere, connecting the street to the mainstream by allowing media outlets to buy pictures taken by ordinary people. Citizen journalism just got organized and – maybe – profitable.
Jonnie Leger, Director of Sales at Demotix Images, told NOW Extra that “during the Gaza conflict, when foreign reporters couldn’t get into the territory, our contributors were giving amazing content.” Indeed, working with citizen journalists resulted in unexpected convergence when Israelis and Palestinians were covering opposite sides of the same events, “we got the same story told by different reporters on the same day — the photos are the same.” The agency received – and sold – images from inside Gaza because its citizens were able to skirt the Israeli media blackout cutting off access to the Strip.
And even before the assault began, several Palestinians were underground, digging out of the Strip. Rare images of these burrowers floated out onto the global newswire via Demotix as talk of tunnels and smuggling began to fray the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel.
It is not only from hard-to-reach places like Gaza that citizen journalists can sell images. As newspapers and television networks face declining revenues and close foreign bureaus, many are looking for ways to capitalize on the power of the internet and an undiminished demand for foreign reportage. Turi Munthe, the founder and CEO of Demotix, saw an opportunity and in early 2008 started the company.
For the past year, Demotix has advertised on social networking sites and searched for promising photographers on flickr.com, a photo-sharing website with a devoted following. Today, Demotix boasts over two thousand regular contributors, and emerged from “stealth beta” mode to become official in August last year.
Before founding Demotix, Munthe worked at the Royal United Services Insititute, the world’s oldest defense and security think tank, where he studied radicalization. He was also a journalist and spent time reporting in Beirut and the Middle East, where he found himself drawn “further and further toward civil society.”
But he became disenchanted by the mainstream media and its decline, telling NOW Extra that he watched the media, “commit a quite efficient harakiri over the past few years,” as outlets shut down foreign bureaus and slashed staff rosters.
Munthe saw an opportunity to link media outlets with an increasingly dependable and sophisticated network of independent photojournalists, and Demotix was born. Although determinedly a global company, the Middle East has provided its biggest hit – with Gaza, and there is talk of an Arabic website.
Aside from a desire to bolster the ailing news industry, Munthe “sought to create a social enterprise, a business model that can do good.” Munthe’s experiences have led him to believe that the more closed and blocked a society’s media is, “the more likely you are to be dealing with issues of eventual serious radicalization…When you put a society into a pressure cooker and you heat it up, things pop.”
Hence, Demotix’s moral underpinnings: “If you can get street reporters published and give them a bit of a megaphone, it’s slightly harder for governments to come and crack down on them.”
Other companies have experimented with concepts like Munthe’s with varying degrees of success. In 2006 the Calgary, Canada-based Istockphoto.com created a successful stock photography agency by using the internet to connect independent photographers, was purchased by Getty Images for $50M.
On the news side, organizations such as CNN, al-Jazeera, The New York Times, and others have slowly increased the amount of “citizen journalism” they include in their regular coverage, but it has been dependent on the charity of photographers and their willingness to surrender their copyright. This stemmed from the idea that citizen journalism was something “unprofessional” that could easily be compromised by biased providers. But as the technology of the cameraphone improved and proliferated, the acceptability of “user generated content,” or UGC, increased.
Demotix created a paying market for the photographers whose citizen journalism has been used as free material by news agencies for years. Now, Demotix sells those images to those same outlets for mainstream prices, passing half the money on to the photographers.
One problem posed by the market is danger for journalists sending valuable images from oppressive regimes. Clearly, Demotix needs images from, say, Myanmar and Syria as much as from Lebanon and London, but journalists in those places can face severe punishments. So, Demotix has incorporated layers of security that strip the metadata (hidden information incorporated into an image’s file data) from submissions. Proxy servers are also used if the user would like to cover their tracks and prevent internet tracing from following too closely.
Following submission, Demotix works closely with its contributors to ensure that a tightly edited package is presented for sale, and that any doubts about the images are eliminated. Jonnie Leger explained that all content is treated the same way that images from a professional photojournalist would be, and that “unless I’m 100% sure this is real, I can’t push it out to the press.” Leger ensures the legitimacy of the UGC by keeping in close contact with photographers throughout the process.
Swayed by the story, this sometime photographer signed up with Demotix and can report that there is a simple signup process and straightforward privacy agreement. Within a few minutes, I was uploading my first story. The beta version of the site still is a bit choppy in places, but it works well and efficiently.
The online submission form makes tagging and organizing photos by story easy. Anyone can search the site for a story, and after submission photos are updated into a section of recently submitted content. No takers yet, but it is good to be part of a community in the business of telling their stories to the world.
Originally published in NOW Lebanon on January 27, 2009.
