CLIP Citizen photojournalism site Scoopt to close

Posted by Helena Deards on February 4, 2009 at 10:12 AM

Citizen photojournalism site Scoopt will be no more after February 6, its parent company Getty Images has announced.  The site, which was created in 2005 and bought by Getty Images less than two years ago, will continue to exist until March 6th although no new images will be accepted. Getty spokeswoman Molly McWhinnie said that the decision would allow the company "to focus our energies on more of our core products".

Scoopt allows amateur journalists to contribute their works, which are then sold on to publishers.  The photographer keeps copyright whilst Scoopt gets an exclusive 12-month license, and profits from the sale of an image are split 50/50 between the two.  Getty Images currently also has a deal with social media site Flickr whereby selected Flickr images are featured on the Getty Images platform.

The demise of the site could perhaps be seen as unexpected in an era where citizen journalism and photojournalism have an increasing presence in all manner of publications.  However now that amateur journalists can go straight to the public via sites such as Twitter and TwitPic (last month's Hudson plane crash for example), perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that the middle man is no longer needed.  But Scoopt's editorial aspect is what TwitPic lacks, that which allows users tolook at images and trust in their origins - and this is perhaps the real loss to the world of photojournalism.