This new platform is quite simply astounding. CrowdMedia just might change photo journalism forever with crowdsourcing news photography from anyone on the scene….
Interesting discussion regarding smartphone photojournalism with renowned photography theorist Fred Ritchin here
CrowdMedia’s premise is simple: Crowd sourced social photos shared on Twitter or Instagram are, more and more, becoming critically important to news coverage. So the startup offers an automated platform that gets those pictures out of social media and onto the front page of major news organizations, with rights cleared and money in the owner’s pocket … all within minutes.
“We want to completely crush today’s model of journalism,” co-founder and CEO Martin Roldan told me last night.
On June 7, literally 15 minutes after launching, the platform proved itself.
“There was a shooting incident at Santa Monica College, near where President Obama was. Within the first 15 minutes we were live,” Roldan said. “It was intense in the office.”
CrowdMedia’s platform, which combs through 150 million shared photos every day, searching for the .03 percent that are newsworthy, noticed the surge in attention, found the only photos from inside the locked-down Santa Monica college, cleared the rights with the student who took them, and sold them to publishers.
It’s not every startup that sees that instant kind of proof-of-concept. And the system, which is still in private pre-beta with a small group of media outlets, proved itself again last week during the Asiana crash at San Francisco airport.
“We got photos on the Huffington Post from people who were there,” Roldan said. “We caught these photos mostly by geolocation.”
