Imagery - first ideas from Ja'Mein, Maria and Fernando

Our vision is to provide a site where citizen journalists and the public alike can showcase their photo and video images of newsworthy events.

1. Who is our target audience? (hint: Don't try to be all things to all people)

Our target audience will be local, national—ideally, international—media outlets (TV, digital and newspapers, news websites, etc.) Our users will be people who want to get the best of the best, without having to wade through just any uploaded material.

2. What is the competitive landscape? (hint: Sites that do it well)

Our competition is formidable. It includes You Tube, Citizen Tube, I report, and This is me reporting. However, although they have the basic component of our project, namely, amateur-produced photos and videos, what they are doing is not exactly the same as ours. We can in fact learn from their websites how to do something different.

3. How do we differentiate ourselves? (hint: Secret sauce)

We will differentiate our website by merging images and blogging, citizen testimonials, video dialogues and citizen voting to showcase the best material that we can market to media outlets. In addition to breaking news, our image blogs will cover forthcoming, citizen-contributed events, as in FLickr Blog . For issues of national importance and controversy, we will allow video debate as in bloggingheads.tv . The image blogs and "diaVlogs" will be voted upwards through Digg or something similar. Our nearest sister website is purplestatestv, with the difference that we will add public debate and citizen participation to vote up the photo and video images to be showcased on the website.

4. How do we create our site? (hint: Staff and schedule)

Staff:

* One website designer.

* One search engine optimization expert.

* Two sales people who offer the images to the media

* Someone to act as a verifier or watchdog (to filter out unrelated content)

Schedule:

* One month to do research on marketing requirements

* Two months to build the website

* One month to spread the word and test it

* One month to tweak it and build sponsorship

* One month to create the buzz and go "live"

5. How do we get our content? (hint: Pre-built, manual, automatic, updated)

We will crowd-source from citizen journalists already submitting content to local and large metropolitan newspapers and websites. Our website's structure will be similar to Craigslist in being organized by Region (states and major cities) and by key Topic (major political events, social movements, public upheavals, natural disasters, etc.). People would upload their images to a website with a pre-built structure. Updates will also be obtained from RSS feeds from the citizen journalist websites that have now proliferated.

6. How do we market our site? (hint: Spread the word)

* By spreading the word among people we know, professional journalism associations, citizen journalist non-profit organizations, and media outlets

* Through search engine optimization

* By social marketing--utilizing platforms such as Twitter and Facebook

* By links in our blogs and blogs of people we know and are willing to help.

* Once we manage to actually get these images out to the media, we would ask for two copyright notices—one for the actual owner and another one for our website.

7. How do we sustain the site? (hint: Show me the $$$)

* By selling the images to media outlets and splitting the profit with the owner of the image.

* By earning a percentage of the ads (also splitting the profits with the owner of the image)