Fox Turns Viewers Into Stringers With App

User-generated content has been slowly creeping into newscasts for years, but now Fox Television Stations is aiming to accelerate the practice with an app that lets the station group assign citizen journalists to happenings about town and then pay them for pictures and/or video from the scene.

After successfully testing the Fresco News app at its WTXF Philadelphia over the past few weeks, Fox will be rolling it out to stations in 10 other markets: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Austin, Houston, Phoenix, Tampa, Charlotte and Orlando, it announced this morning.

Jim Driscoll, news director at WTXF, says he has been pleased with the app and the public participation and response. “We are really excited about the possibilities of this.”

Fresco founder-CEO John Meyer says it’s a valuable new news-gathering tool. “Fresco allows a station to get video of anything, anywhere; it eliminates its reliance on the number of crews it has … and it further engages with the community who is watching its broadcast.”

Contributors get $50 for each video and $20 for each still that makes it to air.

According to Driscoll, WTXF began using it on Feb. 10, but the “hard launch” with on-air announcements didn’t come until Feb. 23.

“We did a package [on the morning show] where we introduced viewers to what the concept was and we saw the numbers explode. We then did it again on our 5 o’clock news. We saw the numbers explode again. We did it on our weekend morning show that Saturday and saw the numbers explode again.”

Meyer said that WTXF has made 150 assignments so far, but neither he nor Driscoll would say how many people have downloaded the app or been paid for content.

Fresco is more than an app. It operates a 24/7 newsroom in New York that checks assignments before they go out for accuracy and safety and then verifies the incoming content before making it accessible to the client, Meyer said.

The process is simple, he said. The producer at the station puts out a call for coverage — the assignment — using the Fresco website. That involves “dropping a pin on a map” and supplying a few details about what’s going on — be it a fire, accident or county fair.

“Once that assignment is posted, our newsroom will approve it within a minute or two and then, boom, our users with smartphones nearby are instantly notified,” Meyer said. “They travel to the scene and get the station on-demand video and photos in the matter of minutes.”

Stations actually pay $75 per video and $30 per still, but Fresco rakes off a third from each for its troubles. Users input a bank account number in the app, and payments are made directly to the account.

Meyer thinks it is a good thing if more than one user responds to an assignment. “With multiple shooters at the scene, it gives the stations a completely new dimension of what’s going on. They can actually go from on perspective to another. “It also eliminates any bias from having just one person there.”

But recognizing that too many users at the scene can also be a problem, Fresco and its client station can limit how many react to an assignment by restricting the area in which an assignment is sent, said Fresco spokesperson Ashley Seashore. The smaller the area, the fewer users will respond, she said.

Fresco also handles the rights management, Meyer said. The user always owns the content, he said. When they send it in, they are merely licensing the station to use it. The station has to credit the user by full name on air.

“It really gets our citizen journalists quite excited,” Meyer said. “They get to go home and tell all their friends and family, ‘My video in going to appear on Fox29.’ “

Once qualified, users don’t have to wait for an assignment, Meyer said. If they happen upon a newsworthy event, they can shoot it and send it in to Fresco. Fresco notifies the station, and, if it is interested, it can buy it on the same terms as an assignment.

Fresco also tries to acts as a buffer, limiting its own and the station’s liability should something go terribly wrong, Meyer said.

The Fresco newsroom evaluates the situation and if it decides it is dangerous, it will not issue an assignment, but rather a “local emergency alert,” and it will tell users not to go to the scene. “However, we also mention that if you are already at the scene and you have something newsworthy we will accept that,” he said. “It’s worked pretty well for us so far.”

The Fresco newsroom also works to verify that the images are what the users say they are. One way of doing that is creating a “virtual bubble” — an area — around the news event and then making sure than the content comes from inside that bubble.

WTXF’s Driscoll said that when a Fresco rep approached him last fall, he was fully receptive. He said he and station GM Dennis Bianchi have been looking for a way to better mobilize viewers as stringers. “I remember having a conversation two years ago about citizen journalists and how to harness the power of the technology that’s out there and the telephones that people have in their hands … and how we can make that part of our news organization.”

Fox Television Stations SVP News Operations Sharri Berg added: “We’ve been trying to do this the right way for years, but all that was missing were some ambitious 20-somethings and a simple app.”

The best example so far of the power of the service came early Monday morning, Driscoll said. The station sent out an alert on a barn fire in Moorestown, N.J., and a couple of people responded and sent in video while the fire was at its peak.

“It was like, wow, look at that,” he said. Had we sent a crew and gotten there 20 minutes later, he said, “we may only have gotten smoke.”

Citizen journalists can also save stations time and money by giving them a quick and early look at what’s going on at a scene, Driscoll said. The stations can then decide whether it’s worth sending a helicopter or crew, he said. “So, in addition to them being part of our news gathering, they are also helping us decide on how big stories are.”

Driscoll has no complaints about the quality of the video he has been getting. “They assured us it was going to be good, and you know what, they were right. …They are training their folks who download the app to shoot in certain ways. They actually will only send us stuff that is really of quality that would be good for broadcasting.”

And he professes confidence in Fresco’s ability to prevent hoaxes. “They presented their verification process to us, which blew us away. Not only is it based on time stamping, but radius. They have it all figured out.”

The app  is not market exclusive, except in Philadelphia where WTXF will be the sole client for having been first to fully embrace the service, Meyer said.

In the other Fox markets, Fresco will make money solely from the vig on the users’ payments, Meyer said. But all other stations will have to pay $500 a month.

Meyer said that a few other large deals with broadcasters are pending, but he declined to identify them.

Fresco worked with Media General last summer, but that effort was put on hold after the group became entangled first with its bid to buy Meredith and then it deal to merge with Nexstar, Meyer said.

So far, Fresco has raised $2.1 million from venture capital funds and some former media executives, including CNN co-founder Reese Schonfeld, MediaBistro founder Laurel Touby, former Yahoo executive Ross Levinsohn and former NewsCorp. and AOL exec Jonathan Miller.

Fresco does not have the market to itself. If fact, there are at least three others — Stringwire, Stringr and Capture. NBCUniversal figures in two of them. It purchased Stringwire in 2013 and Capture lists NBC News and CNBC among its clients on its website.

Stringr was the subject of a story in TechCrunch last December that said that it had raised $1.5 million. CEO Lindsay Stewart is a former TV news producer, the story said.