Navigation

Crowdfunding

Emphas.is is a platform where photographers rather than journalists find funding for their projects. You put your profile and proposal up, try and attract investors and then, when you’re reached your money target, do your project and send your investors personal emails and blog updates on your progress. Following on from the success of crowd funding sites such as Spot.us, sites like Emphas.is offer a future for Networked Journalism, to use Charlie Beckett’s phrase.

Former GEO editor and Hamburger turned New Yorker Tina Ahrens came up with the idea together with photojournalist and partner Karim Ben Khelifa. Below is my translation of an interview with Ahrens from German magazine Photo News (2/11), and the original German afterwards.

The main problem with the idea, I believe, is that projects are chosen, as the website itself describes it, by “[a] carefully selected … board of reviewers composed of industry professionals.” Never mind that elsewhere it states that it’s doing away with the ‘gatekeepers’. I’d like to know who these reviewers are – do they choose new and emerging talent, or mid-career and established photographers. I’ve heard that it’s the latter.

The gap between the enunciated content of a statement and the act of its enunciation is this: “you’re saying this, but why are you telling me it openly now?” The act of publicly reporting on something is never neutral — it affects the reported content itself. The same goes for this statement by emphas.is: why are you saying this publicly? What is there about this statement that made you enunciate it? What is problematical is the fact that this is openly stated. It is an indication of the deep change in our ethical standards.

There’s been similar criticism of crowdfunding. One blogger laments that ‘subjective editorial curatorial opinion runs the photojournalism industry’ (Iamnotasuperstarphotographer; duckrabbit). Elsewhere the same commentator writes that the photojournalism industry, ‘instead of building an effective bottom up audience engaging structure that is both responsive and evolutionary in what it does, it has in parts become a top down curatorial and editorially driven industry that runs itself like an exclusive club that spends much of its time struggling to establish its ideology onto the world of XBOX’s, iPhones, Facebook, digitisation and rapid innovation.’

It may be true that the industry is heavy with editors, and yes, I always read the same names in portfolio reviews and judging panels, but I had coffee with Tina Ahrens at Arles in 2010 and she had many words of encouragement for me and good advice to offer. The problem is less that a self-selecting group of people is choosing what is producible in terms of output, which has always been the case, but that photojournalism is necessarily going the way of reality TV and personality-led stories in search of cash. And in order to do so, it’s pushing the myth of the photographer as the hero, wanderer, bardic traveller through the funnel of The Apprentice. Whether a small group of individuals chooses a story, or a large group of donators, the photojournalist is always dependent upon audience.

Anyway, here’s the Photo News interview with Tina Ahrens:

‘I think it’s going to get tougher to sell finished content over the internet, and by that I mean stories. People are now used to getting their information and news free on the net and it would be difficult to turn back the clock. Therefore with Emphas.is we’ve asked what today’s readers are prepared to pay for with photojournalism. They’re not paying to read finished stories on the net. But there is a very large market for photography workshops, portfolio reviews, photography festivals, discussions, and so on; in other words everything that has to do with professional photojournalists. Advanced amateurs are a huge market and they’re prepared to give money to have contact with professional photojournalists. Our aim is to shift the gatekeeping process away from traditional decision makers within the media and towards the end users. Instead of trotting out complete, ready-made stories, we ask readers what really interests them; what they want to see. We make the end users participants of the whole production process and support the production through crowdfunding. The end users then become part of a select, in-the-know group. We reckon that in future a photographer will be able to pitch a story to the public just as well as they were pitching in the past to a magazine. As social networking has grown, you can now find ardent supporters for any idea in almost every corner of the world. Not so long ago that wasn’t possible. The scope has increased enormously and that means great opportunities.’

‘Ich glaube, es wird weiterhin schwer sein, fertige Inhalte im Netz zu verkaufen, damit meine ich, Geschichten als solche. Die Internetnutzer haben sich daran gewöhnt, Informationen/Nachrichten umsonst zu bekommen und man wird das Rad nur schwer zurückdrehen können. Wir haben uns deshalb bei Emphas.is die Frage gestellt, wofür die Leser heute bezahlen, wenn es um Fotojournalismus geht. Sie zahlen nicht, um fertige Geschichten im Netz zu lesen. Aber es gibt einen sehr großen Markt für Fotoworkshops, Portfolio Reviews, Fotofestivals, Diskussionen etc., also alles, was mit einer Begegnung mit professionellen Fotojournalisten zu tun hat. Der Markt der ambitionierten Amateure ist enorm groß und diese Gruppe gibt Geld für den Kontakt zu Fotojournalisten aus. Bei Emphas.is ermöglichen wir genau diese Art von Begegnung mit professionellen Fotojournalisten. Unser Ziel ist es, den Gatekeepingprozess zu verlagern, weg von den Entscheidern in den Medien, hin zu den Nutzern. Anstatt dem Nutzer fertig zugeschnittene Geschichten aufzutischen, fragen wir den Leser, was ihn wirklich interessiert, was er sehen will. Wir machen die Nutzer zu Partnern im Produktionsprozess und unterstützen Produktionen durch “crowdfunding”. Sie werden dadurch Teil einer eingeweihten Gruppe. Wir denken, dass ein Fotograf sich in Zukunft genauso gut an die Allgemeinheit wenden kann, statt einem Magazin eine Geschichte vorzuschlagen. Durch das Wachstum der Social Networks kann man für jedes Thema Begeisterte finden und das an fast jedem Winkel der Erde. Das war vor einigen Jahren noch nicht möglich. Die Reichweite hat sich enorm erweitert und das birgt große Chancen.’

Posted 1 year ago with 2 notes
Tags: my articles  crowdfunding