New agency to sell scoop photos for amateurs

A decade ago, during an evening of substance abuse, several people who subsequently became some of the principals of this fine journal came up with an idea. Extrapolating upon the growing penetration of digital cameras and the internet, we were into a second bottle of Jack Daniels by the time we’d hatched the idea for a global network we christened “bozos with cameras.” The idea was that as digital cameras became ubiquitous almost every newsworthy event would be captured by an amateur photographer and hence there was an opening for a global syndication agency to represent the non-professional with a scoop – the man in the street who happened to be in the right place at the right time with their camera (they didn’t have camera phones back then but it is the camera phone that has created the ubiquity) to catch a newsworthy event. Virtually everybody now has a mobile phone, and virtually every mobile phone now comes with a camera. This means that somebody, somewhere is in a position to photograph just about anything that happens on the planet. Well, the third bottle of JD ensured we didn’t do anything the next day and the rest is (a lack of) history. Now, there is such an agency. Scoopt is a photographic agency that represents people who have still or moving images of newsworthy events, making sure the right newspapers/TV networks see their photo and ensuring that they get a good deal. Bloody good idea, heh what!