Citizen Image (http://www.citizenimage.com/), a leading citizen journalism photography agency, has launched ciAssignment Board, a service allowing commercial content buyers from a wide variety of businesses–from news organizations to advertising agencies -- to solicit and acquire submissions of photographs with specific, assigned content. The ciAssignment Board provides commercial outlets a valuable resource for soliciting and acquiring images of breaking news events from camera-equipped bystanders, as well as specific stock images for commercial purposes. The ciAssignment Board has already successfully matched many top quality images from Citizen Image contributors with the requests of professional content buyers, providing income to Citizen Image contributors for their images.To extend its reach, Citizen Image has struck several new business development deals including an agreement with Fotolog (http://www.fotolog.com/), the world’s largest photo-blogging community and the third most actively used social network on the Internet. The Fotolog agreement allows its contributors to respond to Citizen Image’s assignment board requests within the Fotolog site, adding almost 10 million potential new photographers to Citizen Image’s reach. Fotolog plans to incorporate these hot news and stock image requests into their popular “Photo Hunt” and group message board features. The Fotolog community will then post and rate pictures in response to the Photo Hunt, and the top ranked images are either proactively pushed to news media outlets or submitted to the requestor by Citizen Image.
Posting requests on the ciAssignment Board is open to any image buyer who creates a free account with the service. Once the Citizen Image buyer posts an assignment, that assignment is shared with the Citizen Image user community and its partners. The buyer sets the bounty and the outline of the request, and the responding photographer receives 50 percent of the gross proceeds each time their image is sold.
Citizen Image has already successfully matched assignment board requests for ad agencies like GSD&M and The Week Magazine. Kelly Kingman, photo editor of “The Week,” says she finds the Citizen Image assignment board a valuable bridge between the professional and user-generated community.
The ciAssignment board is available to anyone at: http://www.citizenimage.com/view_assignments.do
