Agence France-Presse (AFP) Takes Shareholding in Citizen Journalism Venture Scooplive

Scooplive goes international and becomes Citizenside.com

Paris, Nov. 27, 2007. Agence France-Presse (AFP) and IAM, a company founded by Xavier Gouyou Beauchamps and Pascal Josephe, reported that it had taken minority shareholding in Scooplive, a pioneer in citizen reporting, renamed to 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 and enables amateurs and professionals to sell their news documents (events, celebrities, sports, etc.) to the media worldwide.

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.

 

About Agence France-Presse (AFP)

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.

About Scooplive/IAM

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.