Entering the afternoon session at JEECamp, delegates have been invited to pitch their ‘journalism enterprise’ ideas to the floor.
Kyle McRae, who left photo agency Scoopt, which he founded, only a week ago, raised the idea of Qotz (working title), a community site, where online articles and content will be submitted and filtered on the basis of ‘pull quotes’.
The pull quote, says McRae, is the bait that draws the reader into an article and by tagging content in this way adds more value to the recommendation.
Content would then be searchable by pull quotes and categorised.
While suggesting the service would share similarities with Digg, McRae said there would be ‘no a-list bias’ e.g. no users would have more authority or privilege over others.
Answering a question on how Qotz would differ from del.ici.ous, he said: “del.ici.ous has limited value because it’s the same people recommending the same sites, without any real justification of why.”
Very much in its infancy, with McRae himself admitting he is 60/40 over whether this is a good idea (no indication of direction given) – but how useful would you find this?
I think it’s a great idea. Anything that helps me get articles out there is always going to be welcome.
There is little practical merit in the idea. What would be the point of it anyway, if all the person behind it ends up selling on the idea to mainstream media? In this case, maybe he won’t but he did with Scoopt despite all its grandious ideas. Bottom line, if you want to get your stories/pictures out there – just get in touch with the mainstream media, or set up your own website, or maybe just try an alternative that doesn’t sell out to the mainstream media. I recently took a sequence f pictures of a heron eating a duck and got a mainstream agency to sell them on, whichy they did. I would have used Getty because of their reputation but Barcroft Media got in on the act very quickly, so I went with them.