On 16 July Henry Louis Gates, one of the most eminent scholars in African and American Studies, was arrested in front of his own home for alleged disorderly conduct. The arrest came after a neighbour saw the man break into the house - Gates had forgotten his keys. The arrest launched a week-long debate on racial profiling, in which President Barack Obama was forced to intervene.

The incident also brought a six-month old media company to the headlines - Demotix. At the time of Gates' arrest a neighbour, William Carter, used his mobile phone to take a photo of the African-American scholar in handcuffs. Carter went on Demotix and uploaded the image, which was the only one documenting the arrest. The image was licensed by CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and The Guardian, among many others, and the photographer received more than $2000 in royalties. 'It happened by chance that one person snapped an image that was then used all over the world,' says Turi Munthe, Demotix's co-founder and chief executive officer.

People power

Demotix was launched in December last year, with the goal of engaging 'a dedicated and involved international audience' by helping to distribute and publish everyday citizens' news and photos. 'We are a news space generated by the people for the people,' said Munthe at the time.

Munthe first thought of Demotix in 2007. 'I was very interested in social enterprise as an idea,' he tells BJP. 'How to create a sustainable organisation that can create a lot of good? And the kind of work I was doing was about terrorism and issues of radicalisation. I wanted to look at how to invert such radicalisation. Two years ago, I stumbled on citizen journalism and thought I could kill several birds with one stone.'

Coincidentally the mainstream media was suffering from one of its deepest crises, which, Munthe says, is the result of news organisations doing hara-kiri on themselves. 'There is a mass shrinking in the news-gathering apparatus,' he says. 'Most newspapers don't have foreign correspondents any more and they all rely on Reuters or Associated Press, both of which have also been cutting down their staff numbers. As a result, we know less and less of what's going on around the world.

His goal was to create a safe place for ordinary people to tell their stories, he continues. 'More importantly, we wanted to take these stories and push them to the mainstream media, providing an alternative newswire to AP and Reuters, an alternate source of news.'

How do you start such enterprise? By finding the kind of content that is easiest to gather, promote, sell and license online, says Munthe. 'And that's photography.'

As with any for-profit organisation, Demotix needed a viable business model, although one of its goals is to push money back to its contributors. Each photographer receives 50% of any sale, with images going for as little as $50 to more than $3000 in rare cases. Contributors also keep the copyright to their photos.

Citizen journalism

The business model isn't new. As far back as 2005, Kyle MacRae launched Scoopt, which aimed at capitalising on the growth of user-generated content by helping amateur photographers sell their images direct to newspapers and magazines. At first the experience was successful, prompting Getty Images to acquire the business in 2007. One of the site's most successful images was taken by Dean Collins in October 2006, and captured the moment a light aircraft crashed into a 50-storey residential tower block in New York. It was published on the front page of The New York Times.

But that was to be Scoopt's only high-profile success story. In 2009, Getty shut the site down arguing that competing against established media names took too many resources. 'People are now more visually educated,' said Alison Crombie of Getty in February. 'There is more awareness that they can interact directly with the media. Every time something significant happens, you will see the BBC or Sky ask for people's photos and videos.'

But Scoopt's failure didn't impact on Demotix's resolve, says Munthe. 'I don't want to speculate, but it seems that Getty didn't allocate the right resources behind it,' he tells BJP. 'Scoopt was also UK-based and centred on paparazzi-style images of celebrities. These are very competitive markets. I suppose Demotix learnt a lot from other firms such as Scoopt, or Now Public. We've taken various elements from these, the best of all that came before.' Now Public is a Vancouver-based online platform for participatory news- gathering, distributing news, images and videos.

Unlike these ventures, however, Demotix doesn't market itself as a citizen journalism site. 'We hate the term "citizen journalism", because it's being used by old-media types, who always try to demean it by saying that it is as trust-worthy as citizen brain surgery,' says Munthe. 'We prefer the term Street Journalism, because, in effect, the reporting is coming from the ground-up. It's grass-root reporting, instead of the editors deciding what the real story is. What interests us is the quality of the content.'

Plus, he adds, it doesn't really describe the people who he works with. 'Some of our best contributors are old journalists who have been working at newspapers and old-media companies for years,' he says.

Global focus

Demotix has also differentiated itself from other news by its intense focus on the 'rest of the world'. The site's most active visitors are not necessarily living and working in Europe or in the US, because Demotix has 10,000 contributors from more than 130 countries. Each local photojournalist, or amateur photographers, possesses local knowledge of what is really happening in his or her neighbourhood, town or country, Munthe tells BJP. 'Street journalism is also about the regular things from all over the world.

'We report the unreported,' he adds. 'For example, right now, you have in Nepal hundreds of Maoist supporters staging protests, paralysing the country. But since the UK hasn't been involved in Nepal for over 200 years, there is nothing in the UK press. Shouldn't it be covered?'

Demotix's biggest successes have come with 'surprise' events, as Munthe labels them, such as last June's Iranian elections. 'Every single reporter was kicked out of the country,' Munthe says. 'Demotix was then the only source of reliable news. Our photos made the cover of The New York Times twice in three days.'

Another surprise event, which came with its single image, was the Hudson River plane crash. But the photographer, Janis Krums, didn't know about Demotix when he distributed his shot. 'I've met him since,' says Munthe, 'and he told me: "If only I'd known about Demotix, I would have made a lot of money".'

Now, Demotix is moving to the next stage - video. With camera manufacturers adding video features to all the latest digital SLRs and mobile phones now coming with video as standard, it is a natural evolution for the street journalism site, which will start distributing video files in early 2010. However, Munthe reassures its contributors and clients, that photojournalism will remain the principal focus of the team.

In brief

Demotix employs five full-time and five part-time staffers, whose tasks are to moderate and help the community of 10,000 contributors share their images. 'We have people in New York, London, Madrid, Colorado, who handle the 500 images we get each day,' says Turi Munthe, Demotix's co-founder and CEO. These editors are also in charge of informing local contributors of any major event that's about to take place in their vicinity.

The next step is to push the best images and features to the mainstream media. 'We often meet with online and news editors at national papers in Europe and in the US,' he adds. 'Broadly, they're interested by what we're up to, especially if they are limited to the wire services they subscribe to.'

As with AP and Reuters, newsrooms can subscribe to Demotix' feed of daily images. The content is available both on an exclusive and non-exclusive basis.

Visit demotix.com.