Video marketplace Stringr on the hunt for local media partner for Australian launch
Freelance journalism crowdsourcing app Stringr is looking for a local media organisation to partner with in order to launch locally. The partnership will provide an exclusivity deal for six months.
Stringr allows videographers to receive freelance jobs from media outlets and offers media outlets access to vision in parts of the country they may not have teams in.
Lindsay Stewart, CEO of Stringr, told Mumbrella: “Stringr is a video marketplace that allows customers like NBC stations, ABC stations and the Associated Press to literally put a pin on a map and ask for the custom footage that it wants.
“It could be anything from an interview to a breaking news event to a community event to beauty shots; they ask for that video and what we have done is build a nation-wide network in the US that responds to those requests, basically in real-time.
“The videographers – there’s about 25,000 of them in the US – are able to field these requests, they shoot the video and then that video appears quite readily on the platform so our end customers can look at it and download it in a HD format.
“It allows our customers to get major events and also small things that interest them in particular. It’s a place where you can get video of anything you want,” she added.
Lindsay Stewart: “We don’t focus on citizen journalism. We are just out there to get them the video that they need”
Stringr wants to bring the service to Australian media outlets, however Stewart stresses that the company is not about replacing journalists.
“We don’t focus on citizen journalism, we very much leave the journalism to our customers and our partners. We are just out there to get them the video that they need,” she said.
“If Stringr were to exist here, and we’re very much looking for a partner here with that we can jumpstart that with, the print and the publishing world has some of the best journalists in the community.
“I have said to these newsrooms, you don’t need to go out and try and hire the one or two videographers anymore, you can use Stringr to get the video you need and let the journalists that you already have in-house to do the good work they’ve been doing but use us for the visuals you need.”
Stewart said Stringr would initially work through the launch partner.
“What we have learned to do is build networks of videographers very quickly and easily and as Australia is an English-speaking country, we don’t have to change our platform, our technology or our app at all,” she said.
“All we have to do is have a good national partner whether it be a publisher or a broadcaster that would like to harness the power of Stringr and allow us to learn from them about the market here.
“We’d be able to provide a service for them exclusively for six months so we they could get to know us and we could build something cool for them.”
Stewart said the vision would be to work with many organisations as possibly “but we have learnt that having one great first customer gives a lot of value”.
Asked if Stringr was looking to expand into Asia, Stewart said it would “be a little choosier at first”.
“We would do that, we would be a little choosier at first as we’d be wanting to operate in a place that allows for a free-press atmosphere because what makes Stringr so successful is having a network of videographers that are allowed to shoot video openly on the street,” she said.
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No mention here or on their website about what the rates will be … inc travel time, kill fees etc. Still, sounds interesting.
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