Scooplive goes international and becomes CITIZENSIDE.COM
Agence France-Presse (AFP) and IAM, a company founded by Xavier
Gouyou Beauchamps and Pascal Josephe, reported this morning that it
had taken minority shareholding in Scooplive, renamed CITIZENSIDE.
Scooplive, a company founded in 2006 by Matthieu Stefani, Julien
Robert and Philippe Checinski, gives individuals the opportunity to
sell their pictures and videos on current news, in return for a small
commission. The company now takes a step forward and becomes
CITIZENSIDE (www.citizenside.com), a site which enables the media to
use the platform that has been developed for two years as a white
label. The media will thus be able to cultivate nearness and
interaction with their readers or audience, and to obtain from them
news documents to complement their own or agencies production.
Committed to its clients, the media, AFP aims at helping them to
develop a privileged relationship with their readers or audience, and
to obtain from the public valuable news by holding the platform
CITIZENSIDE at their disposal.
"For us, this gives us the opportunity to conduct a commercial and
technologic experience in the world of the web 2.0, for the benefit of
our clients, mainly in the media sector. We intend to offer them the
possibility to use the technological platform under their own brand.
AFP will not be involved in the editorial process of selection and
validation of the documents available on the platform" said Pierre
Louette, AFP Chairman.
With contributors from around 90 countries, citizenside.com is a
site pursuing strategic aims: acceleration of its international
development, widening of its community, increase of the documents
received and of the number of partnerships with the press, TV, web and
mobile media.
CITIZENSIDE wants to emerge as a global leader of qualified
participative information by developing a favoured relationship
between amateur and professional media.
"CITIZENSIDE will capitalize on the experience gained by its
founders and its new partners" says Matthieu Stefani, a founder of
Scooplive.
AFP, the first news agency in the world, was created in 1835 by
Charles-Louis Havas, its current President being Pierre Louette.
Today, it operates in 165 countries and has over 4,000 employees and
7,000 clients.
Citizenside (www.citizenside.com), launched as Scooplive is a
pioneer in citizen reporting. Launched on June 20th, 2006, by Julien
Robert, Philippe Checinski and Matthieu Stefani, Scooplive enables
amateurs and professionals to sell their news documents (events,
celebrities, sports, etc.) to the media worldwide.
Xavier Gouyou Beauchamps is a former adviser of Valery Giscard
d´Estaing and was chief of the press department at the Elysee Palace
from 1974 to 1976. He is also a former president of Sofirad,
Telediffusion de France (TDF) and Sofipost. He was the CEO of France 3
from 1994 to 1996 and then chairman of France Television from 1996 to
1999.
Pascal Josephe is the chairman of IMCA, International Media
Consultant Associes, a company specializing in consultancy in the
world of communications and media that he founded in 1994; prior to
this, he was in charge of different TV channels programs.
Philippe Checinski is a former trader at Refco Trading Services.
He was also in charge of marketing studies at Banque Bipop.
Julien Robert graduated as an engineer (SUPINFO Paris) and
obtained a Master in Web Technologies (Oxford Brookes University) with
distinction. He also received the B.O.C.C. award for developing the
W3C (World Wild Web Consortium), an application dedicated to the
research regarding daltonism.
Matthieu Stefani is one of the pioneers of free daily newspapers
in France. He worked from 2001 to 2005 for Metro France and Metro
International. He is also a founder of Stobacco (www.stobacco.com), a
community site helping its members who want to quit smoking.
