Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » Scoopt

JEEcamp: Kyle Macrae on Scoopt: We’re all entrepreneurs now

Laura Oliver — Mon, 11 May 2009 18:38:14 +0000

They don’t make ‘em like Kyle Macrae, the founder of citizen journalism photography site Scoopt, any more – but maybe they should?

Speaking at Friday’s journalism and enterprise ‘unconference’, JEEcamp, Macrae posited that the only option for journalists at the moment is to be entreprenuerial.

Macrae sold Scoopt to Getty Images in March 2007, before the photography giant shuttered the site in February this year.

Macrae outlined some of the issues with the idea behind Scoopt:

every mainstream media organisation that bought into the idea of user-generated content e.g. send us your pictures of snow – took away from Scoopt’s business
Scoopt needed a default route to market for all valuable content e.g. a partnership with Flickr was discussed, where users posting potentially valuable images could click to sell
there isn’t an unlimited market for editorial photography
Scoopt wasn’t sticky enough – “People would register on site and then wait the rest of their lives for something to happen”

It was impossible to scale the business on a regional level

But, says, Macrae, selling the site was always his ‘exit strategy’ – something all entrepreneurs should have from the start and there were some very valuable nuggets of advice for budding independents in his presentation:

try to step outside of the journalism sector before starting a journalism business – you’ll spot more opportunities this way
similarly, get someone to sanity check your business – preferably someone outside the industry
pay less attention to what the ‘usual commentators’ are saying when considering if you’re idea is good
in an ideal world, you’d have the funding in place first, but start as you mean to go on – think about where the money is going to come from from the very beginnning

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JEEcamp: Audio from the event

Laura Oliver — Mon, 11 May 2009 15:19:49 +0000

Journalism.co.uk attended the journalism and enterprise unconference, JEEcamp, last Friday.

Reports on the day will follow, including:

Kyle Macrae, founder of Scoopt, on why entrepreunership is the only option for journalists now

James Hatts from London-SE1.co.uk on community and hyperlocal news publishing

There’s already been some great videos, pictures and posts from the event – see Michael Haddon’s round-up, Martin Belam’s posts and John Welsh’s blog to name but a few – but some additional (rough) audio from Sue Greenwood’s presentation on self-publishing platform Sweeble and two panel discussions are below.

Sue Greenwood:

Panel 1 featuring: (to come)

Journalism.co.uk’s own John Thompson (@johncthompson)

Jon Bounds, Birmingham: It’s Not Shit (@bounder)

Sue Heseltine from Birmingham City University

Chaired by Joanna Geary, web development journalist, business, Times Online (@timesjoanna)

Panel 2 featuring:

Dave Harte, economic development manager, Digital Birmingham

Jo Wadsworth, web editor, Brighton Argus (@jowadsworth)

Robin Hamman, Headshift (@cybersoc)

Andy Dickinson, journalism lecturer at UCLAN, (@digidickinson)

Robin Morley, assistant editor new media, BBC English Regions

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BJP: Getty and Scoopt founder on why cit-j site was ‘doomed’

Laura Oliver — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:10:07 +0000

Dedicated citizen journalism agency model can never work, says founder Kyle Macrae.

Full story at this link…

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Stock-photo blog: Getty closes cit-j photo site Scoopt

Laura Oliver — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 12:46:57 +0000

Getty Images has announced the closure of citizen journalism photography site Scoopt, which it acquired in 2007.

Full article at this link…

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JEEcamp: pitch from Kyle McRae, ex-Scoopt

Laura Oliver — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:19:17 +0000

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?

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