With Citizenside, AFP Makes It Possible for Media Outlets to Turn Their Audience into a Reliable and Qualified Source of Information

PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--As media outlets harness the power of user-generated content, new tools developed by Agence France-Presse subsidiary Citizenside allow organizations to maintain editorial integrity and control of content from valuable audience contributions.

Citizenside provides content management solutions to communities of amateur photographers and video makers with a passion for news. It offers tools built to integrate and retain communities of users, channel and manage their content, and verify and validate their information.

“The basis of Citizenside is observation: almost everyone today has the technological means to take and distribute photos and videos on the Internet in minutes. In the mass of information sent by Internet users, some content is relevant, even essential, to journalism. There will always be more people equipped with these means of communication on the ground than journalists who find themselves at an incident by chance. We all remember the plane landing in the Hudson or more recently, the images the came out of Iran through social networks,” said Agence France-Presse Chief Executive Pierre Louette.

Some leaders of the French press have already chosen Citizenside: 20 Minutes, RTL, BFMTV, Metro, Le Parisien/ Aujourd’hui en France, Voici, and Public. Several other strategic partners will be announced by the end of the year.

“AFP has brought phenomenal experience to Citizenside over the last two years and has put us in contact with leading international media outlets. We can now help these outlets strengthen links with their audience by developing their approach to user-generated content. The experience of our team, the reliability of our technology and the sustainability that AFP brings are major assets that few startups today can claim,” explained Citizenside co-founder Matthieu Stefani.

This investment is in-line with AFP’s strategy, which aims to make targeted acquisitions of companies in order to support its clients in the ever-changing news landscape.

Citizenside now includes the following:

• A laboratory, on its Citizenside.com site, which helps develop, test and implement the most efficient tools to manage a community of news witnesses.

• The Reporter Kit, a custom solution for media outlets to create preferential relationships with their audience in line with their editorial needs.

• The Editorside.com content sales site, combining Citizenside images and media partners’ Reporter Kits.

About Agence France-Presse (AFP)

AFP is an international news agency delivering fast, accurate, in-depth news from every corner of the world, covering wars and conflicts, politics, sports and entertainment, as well as major developments in health, science and technology. With 2,900 journalists in 165 countries, AFP delivers the news in video, text, photos, graphics and pre-packaged multimedia format to a broad range of clients: newspapers, national news wires, radio and television stations. AFP files 5,000 text stories in six languages, 20 television news reports, up to 3,000 photographs, and 80 still and interactive graphics each day. For more information about AFP products and services, consult www.afp.com.

About Citizenside

CITIZENSIDE (www.citizenside.com) is a pioneer of the citizen reporter movement, with 50,000 members around the world, including 10,000 active contributors. Started in 2006 by Julien Robert, Philippe Checinski and Matthieu Stefani, Citizenside offers amateurs and professionals the opportunity to sell their news documents to worldwide media outlets.

Contact Citizenside : Click here