Citizen journalism is having its moment.
Fox Television Stations has become the first major media outlet to employ citizen journalists.
The broadcaster has partnered with Fresco News, a crowd-sourced news startup that has signed up hundreds of citizen journalists in cities across the country.
The partnership went active on Wednesday and Fox-owned stations in 11 markets — including New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco — will use Fresco’s Newsroom Tool Suite to gather stories.
Fresco’s app, which connects people on the street to newsrooms, notifies citizen journalists who have signed up for the app of open assignments from a local TV station.
Those who pursue an assignment can then submit photos or videos to Fresco, which are quickly vetted by its content team and passed on to the station’s producers.
Fresco receives $75 for each video and $30 for each photo chosen for on-air use. It forwards two-thirds of this revenue ($50 per video and $20 per photo) to the citizen delivering the content.
Fresco and Philadelphia’s Fox 29 began testing the collaboration in February, producing results that beat the expectations of station news director Jim Driscoll.
“We’d been talking about citizen journalism for years,” Driscoll told The Post. “But we didn’t act on it until our vision and Fresco’s model met at the crossroads.”
For example, before dawn on March 7, Fox 29 sent out a Fresco alert about a fire in Moorestown, Pa. — a 20-minute ride from the station. The station instantly received “great video of a huge fire,” Driscoll said, whereas crews dispatched by its competitors were lucky to get “smoking embers” by the time they arrived.
Driscoll also appreciates Fresco’s ability to open up smaller communities that for budget reasons don’t normally warrant coverage. “They can now have their stories told,” he said.
And, as a bonus, the news director sees Fresco contributors becoming loyal station viewers as the community wakes up to the idea that their local TV station has gone interactive.
“The viewer engagement we’ll get out of this two-way platform is invaluable,” Driscoll said.
John Meyer, the 21-year-old who dropped out of New York University after founding Fresco two years ago, believes his app will be of service even in large metro areas swarming with new teams.
“News consumers generally receive a single angle to a story, because news outlets almost always assign one camera or one reporter to any one news scene,” he said. “But we’re already seeing video on TV from three or four Fresco contributors who are covering the same protest, which adds a new dimension to how stories are presented.”
For his contributors, Meyer leans heavily on what he calls “the existing on-demand work force” — a group that includes drivers for Uber and Postmates and other on-the-move iPhone-toting citizens.
Then, as evidence his contributors have taken to the Fox 29 collaboration, he produced a screenshot of a newsroom web panel that uses blue dots to show where active Fresco app users are located in real time.
“Just a few weeks ago, before we started, there wasn’t a pin on the map,” he said.