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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
adopted by newspapers websites. Second: the AFP chief executive since 2010,
Emmanuel Hoog, wants to launch a news platform tailored to individuals, even if this is
runs foul of existing media customers of the agency, for understandable reasons. Third:
AFP developes strategies to provide amateur content, it thus signed a partnership with
the Citizenside agency, specialised in citizen journalism (mainly photos and videos).
This of course raises several questions which are dealt with in the following part,
examining the real place the agency can occupy on Internet.
Today’s online competition : news label and AFP branding
At a time when Internet has 2 billions users, when Google announces 1000 billions of
pages accessed and when individual citizens or traditional media customers are
massively moving to online social networks, Agence France-Presse does not really
have any choice: it has to make its news services meet the interests of all categories of
possible audiences. Internet must not be seen as a threat, be as an opportunity for
international news agencies to enhance their connectivity —the agencies note that
Internet has already reduced the cost of transmission of their services in the past
fifteen years. Strategies therefore include ‘end-users’ themselves; this may mean the
integration of amateur content.
By acquiring 34% of the Citizenside, AFP is moving in that direction. Citizenside.com is
a website —born as “Scooplive” in 2005— which is defined by his founders both as a
laboratory and as a Web 2.0 press agency. Its services include ‘reporters kits’ for
traditional media to develop their own news communities, but its main task is to
propose photos and videos that its website collects from amateurs, who get 65 % of the
sale of their news products to medias (and who keep their authors’ rights). Citizenside
managers say they receive 300 to 500 photos per day, on 60 to 70 topics. Why the
model seems interesting lies in the tools to ensure verification of news provided by
amateurs: journalists at Citizenside require complete and reliable profiles of
contributors; they massively use metadata and geolocalisation of photos to avoid fakes.
Furthermore, they have developed ‘community management’: they regularly
communicate with contributors to enhance the performance of the latter, especially the
quality of their photos/videos. In the end, this even enables the website to alert its
community when needed —when an event is learnt of and if contributors are situated
nearby.
Having AFP as a partner, Citizenside aims for quality rather than quantity. The
company stated that it has moved « from UGC to UCC » 77 : from User Generated
Content to User Certified Content, or ‘quality citizen journalism’. Such a strategy follows
the challenges highlighted by Chris Paterson and David Domingo (2008) in their study
of online news. Although their work does not include France, it reveals that traditional
newspapers websites hardly meet the common Internet goals of immediacy and
77 Matthieu Stefani (co-founder of Citizenside), conference at AFP headquarters, Paris, 26th Nov. 2009.
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