Something is failing in journalism.
We believe journalism is not a luxury, but the nervous system of a healthy democratic society. It is being attacked on two fronts at once.
The external attack:
In a recent survey, only 37% of respondents across the 48 markets studied said they trusted news overall.
Fabricating realities has become cheap and simple. Anyone with a laptop can generate reports of a popular uprising, a missile attack or a political scandal, convincing enough to spread quickly and make an impact and difficult to verify under deadline pressure.
Fabricating images has become easy. Checking their origin takes work, time and resources.
The internal attack:
The journalism market is stacked against the people who produce it.
A distribution system that leaves little of the value in journalists’ hands. Contracts that strip away rights and intellectual property. Citizen reporters whose images reach millions of people and who receive nothing in return.
People are documenting the world everywhere. The infrastructure built to reach them, check their identity, pay them and support their work still belongs to the last century.
The photojournalist who spends three weeks in a difficult area, returns with important work and waits four months to receive a fraction of what that work is worth. The fixer, the driver, the translator, the assistant who made the story possible and whose names appear nowhere.
When all editors rely on the same catalogues from outdated agencies, the view of the world is shaped by what those catalogues contain and what they leave out. A community, a region or a subject does not become less important because it falls outside these filtered catalogues. A story does not stop mattering because nobody has made it easy to find.
News organisations should be able to reach local journalists who know their regions, discover diverse work from different places and perspectives, ask questions of the people who created it and negotiate prices and rights through clear tools.
The blind spots of a distribution system must not become the blind spots of journalism.
We are here because the infrastructure journalism needs has to be built now.
We have built a platform that allows provenance to be examined, bringing together identity checks, authorship records and available signals that editors and readers can consult freely.
A system that makes the economics of journalism work for journalists with complete freedom and independence. That makes fees and payment terms clear, and pays fairly.
We reverse the logic of the market to give workers more power. All our tools are freely accessible and free to use. On the author’s side, we charge only a commission of 20% of the selling price they set. The author receives 80% of that price, so that it becomes possible again to make a living from documenting the real world as it actually is. We handle the administration of licensing transactions on Frontfiles, including contracts, invoices and payments, so journalists can focus on doing their work in the best possible conditions.
We need your help. Together we are stronger.
Join us!
João Nuno Martins
FRONTFILES
www.frontfiles.com