Turi Munthe - Serving the News Market and Democracy

Search

Loading...

News

Latest News

Jul 12, 2013
by Louise Hallman
Turi Munthe - Serving the News Market and Democracy

Founder Turi Munthe explains the need for citizen photo agency, Demotix

Turi Munthe speaks on the panel ‘The Brave New World: Democratization, Decentralization and Citizen Journalism’ at session 502, February 2013

Iran, June 2009: the “green revolution” is mid-swing. Young Iranians take to the streets to protest the presidential election results that sees Mahmoud Ahmadinejad win a second term in office and the Revolutionary Guards with their volunteer militia force, the Basij, heavy-handily try to put down the protests. Western media are refused access – how to tell the story?

That was Demotix’s first front-page photo.

Demotix – a play on the word Greek work “demotic” meaning “of the people” – is a citizen photo, video and news agency, launched in January 2009.

“It emerged out of two linked but separate realizations,” explains founder and former CEO, Turi Munthe, speaking following his participation as a faculty member at the Salzburg Global Seminar session ‘Power In Whose Palm: The Digital Democratization of Photography’ (February 23-27, 2013), where he spoke on the panel ‘The Brave New World: Democratization, Decentralization and Citizen Journalism’.

“The first was that the media being produced was out of an ever-shrinking number of sources... On the other side…I was very interested in the ideas of freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of community as a political tool,” the former foreign correspondent and Middle East analyst elaborates.

“Two big problems. Was there any way of putting these two things together? That’s where Demotix initiated from. We tried to create two things: One, create a free, safe platform for people anywhere to tell stories which were being told, trying to address the issue of the freedom of speech; two, feed those grassroots, local story-tellers into the mainstream media, trying to address the issue of news-sourcing.”

This wasn’t to just be a free, altruistic exercise – Demotix was set up from the beginning to be a business. “We would take your story, uploaded from the backstreets of Bamako, and when we sold it to the New York Times, we’d split whatever we could sell it for 50/50. The idea behind that was that we would be able to create a business virtuous circle, where we could not only supply completely different news stories into the mainstream media, from locals, by locals, telling local stories, with a very different voice from those already told, and on the other hand, incentivize citizen journalism, which I think is a fundamental necessity for democracy,” says Munthe.

Filling a gap in the market…

Demotix has proven to fill a much needed gap in the market.

“In June 2009, during the aborted Iranian uprising, every foreign journalist was arrested, all the locals were forbidden to leave or produce any of their work. I had friends whose materials were taken away, who were put in solitary confinement, not allowed into the country,” Munthe remembers.

“There was a complete lock-down on any kind of foreign, any kind of news, coming out of Iran. We had about two dozen local Iranians on the streets of Tehran, shipping us news and photos. We had Google accounts; we tried to push them through a proxy network, which didn’t work because the internet was being so slowed. But that was our first front page of the New York Times. And ever since, we’ve grown.”

Since its launch over four years ago, Demotix has grown to a community of 30,000 contributors in 212 territories, generating about 150 news stories a day. It has established publishing and sales agreements with a whole host of media outlets across the world including the BBC, Le Monde, Bild, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Grazia magazine and The Guardian, as well as a network of photo resellers in almost 40 countries. It was bought over by photo agency, Corbis, a move that was hailed by Munthe in 2012 as “an enormous step towards our goal of becoming a truly competitive international photojournalism agency.”

…But pushing out the professionals?

But if Demotix is filling a gap in the market with amateurs’ photos, is that not crowding out the professional photographers? After all, it’s much cheaper for a newspaper to buy an image from a newswire than it is to pay the salary of either a staff or freelance photographer.

“On the contrary,” insists Munthe. “Demotix started as a fairly idealistic project and part of that idealism is to ensure that as many people as possible can get involved in the business of journalism. I’m myself a journalist and I’m aware of how much work it takes and that journalism needs to be paid for.

“Demotix is a business and we’ve gone out of our way not just to maintain, but to stick with, the high level of prices.” By providing a collective as well as a route to market, Munthe believes Demotix photographers (despite ceding half of their photographs’ value to the organization’s brokerage charges) earn more than if they tried to sell them alone. Also, given Demotix’s process of verification, they have earned the trust of many media publications and outlets – something a freelancer might have to work years at building.

Every image sold on by Demotix is “verified and edited and checked by us,” says Munthe.

In search of authenticity and authority

“That’s an absolutely critical part of what we do, since we don’t just download Twitter or Facebook and ship it through. We’ve been very careful… We’ve actually added as many obstacles as possible to people uploading photos, since news is difficult and we don’t want pictures of cats and sunsets and flowers and babies. What we want and what we get unfortunately is what’s really happening in the world, so far as earthquakes and accidents and wars. All of that work needs to be very, very carefully checked.”

At Demotix, their verification process is based in round-the-clock technical and human solutions.

“We have a combination of tech and straight-up human processes so that every single picture that goes through Demotix has been checked and edited by an individual editor. We’re using a series of algorithms to understand who is who in our community. We’ve a series of tech filters, which check every single image, for what we’ve been told by the contributor and for what the meta-data can tell us. Finally and most importantly, we have a human network which is global and online 24/7/365 to make sure each image is correct,” he explains.

“Touching wood, as far as I remember, we have not yet sold an image we then had to retract,” says Munthe, with some relief.

“We’ve certainly published images [on the Demotix website] we had to retract, for all sorts of reasons. Unfortunately it’s something that happens on a daily basis to all the big news wires and it’s even more important for us. As a starting business, it’s absolutely critical that our clients can rely on us… “The only reason journalists have any worth is because their readers, or their viewers, or their spectators, believe what they say.”

Culture shift

In addition to filling a gap in the need for photography form some of the world’s most volatile and inaccessible places, citizen journalism outfits like Demotix, maintains Munthe, also fill mainstream media’s growing need for authenticity and authority, owing to a “cultural shift” not only in how news outlets produce news but also in how we, the viewer and reader, consume and digest news. Perhaps it’s a sign of growing general media literacy or part of a wider distrust of authority and increasing sense of democracy, but many consumers are turning away from the traditional mainstream media in favor of their own social networks and the “real” footage they see on sites such as YouTube.

“Fifteen years it would have been inconceivable for the BBC to run anything other than a high-definition, super-edited clip of one of their top correspondents, declaiming to his supine audience what the story of the attack on Kabul was,” says Munthe.

“Today, broadcasters go out of their way, to broadcast hand-held mobile footage. And there you see a real shift, between the trust in authority—which is the trust-in-the-John-Simpson model—through to trust in this shaky hand-held footage, which suggests that it’s real, that it’s authentic.”

This shift, Munthe says, is being mirrored in many areas of culture, from the demise of the Encyclopedia Britannica in the face of the rise of the collaborative online project of Wikipedia, to the proliferation of reality TV shows in lieu of high production dramas.

The democratization of news gathering brought about by dual forces of necessity—the demise of traditional news media’s budget, and opportunity—the ubiquitous digital camera and mobile communications, has shifted some power into the palms of the consumer. But despite his business being built on that, Munthe still has reservations.

“In many ways that’s wonderful and talks to this ever-growing sense of empowerment that people feel they have to contribute to the news and to get involved in the discourse on what’s going on,” says Munthe. “But I also feel, one of the problems is when you disenfranchise the idea of authority, you put knowledge on an equal footing, which is of course an absurdity…

“I think that this shift towards a trust in what is authentic, away from what is authoritative, is fabulous in many ways, but I also think it’s deeply problematic and deeply needs redressing…for the news industry, including photography and photojournalism, to really thrive.”

Turi Munthe stepped down from his role as CEO of Demotix to pursue new opportunities shortly after this interview was conducted.