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How To Publish A Childrens Book
Demotix to distribute photos via Publish2’s news wire
Summer’s brought a growth spurt for Publish 2’s News Exchange. Last week, the cooperative distribution platform announced some big-gun content partners: ProPublica, GlobalPost, Texas Tribune, and Texas Watchdog. And today, it introduced another one: Demotix, the citizen-and-freelance-journalism-driven photography site.
We’re excited to announce that Demotix, the award-winning open photo agency for independent journalists, will begin offering content via Publish2 News Exchange when we launch photo support later this summer. Newspapers and other news organizations will not only benefit from the huge efficiency of sharing photos directly through Publish2 News Exchange, but they will now also benefit from the efficiency of Demotix’s open photo sourcing platform and their presence in the U.S. news market.
The upshot: “With the addition of Demotix to News Exchange, newspapers will also be able to buy photos a la carte for coverage of major news events around the U.S. and around the world.” And “for us at Demotix,” CEO Turi Munthe put it, “this opens a potentially very large segment of the US local market, and the thrill of partnering with a new news organisation that truly shares our beliefs and vision of the future.”
It’s a telling collaboration. Demotix (tagline: “The Street Wire”) lives at the intersection of professional and citizen journalism, offering a wire of user-generated images to mainstream outlets. Revenues are split by Demotix and its journalists: every time an image gets picked up from the Demotix wire, its creator gets a 50-percent share of the revenue. (Hence, another tagline: “News by You.”) And, so far, images captured by the community’s 3,200-plus active reporters (hailing from 190 countries) have appeared on some big-time front pages — The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and Time magazine among them.
(For more background on Demotix, by the way, check out this fantastic overview of the platform, and of its impact on the image marketplace, from the spring issue of our sister publication Nieman Reports.)
The team-up has been in the works for several months, Publish2’s director of news innovation, Ryan Sholin, told me. It’s not only that “we’re totally open to and interested in partnering with anybody and everybody who wants to distribute content across our pipes”; it’s also that Demotix, with its freelanced-content-distribution approach, makes particular sense as a P2 partner. (That’s one reason why, as Sholin pointed out, the Demotix logo was featured on a slide at the News Exchange’s beta launch at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference back in May.)
“I personally think it’s really cool because they focus so heavily on freelancers and almost, really, citizen journalists,” Sholin says of Demotix. “The premise is: ‘You are an independent journalist walking around town, and you see something cool, and take a picture of it — and we will help you sell it to news organizations.’ That flows so cleanly into the vision of what News Exchange can be for freelancers and independent journalists that it was a very natural fit.”
And what Demotix gets from the deal is essentially amplification of its current distribution mechanism: “the opportunity,” Sholin says, “to take the work that’s running through their system and have a much better distribution channel — to go straight into newspapers’ print publishing systems, straight into their FTP folders — without having to do a whole browse-and-download sort of interface.”
The partnership will roll out later this summer, as part of Publish2’s broader expansion into image distribution. The collaborative’s upcoming photo-support platform will make it easier, Sholin says, “for anybody to share photos — for newspapers to share photos, for other content providers to sell photos in the system.” And “Demotix will be one of the content providers in the system at launch.”
Megan Garber | Aug. 3 | 1:30 p.m.
Tags: citizen journalism, collaboration, content sharing, Demotix, Publish2, Publish2 News Exchange, Ryan Sholin, user generated content
Saving the Stories of Beverly Jensen
When Beverly Jensen, my wife, was dying in 2003, she feared she'd been given talents and had not used them. But in fact she had. Last month, Viking published The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay, which Elizabeth Strout and Joyce Carol Oates championed and which Stephen King calls “completely beautiful.”
On December 19, 2002, Beverly learned that a C-T scan revealed “lesions” on her pancreas and liver. The doctor held out hope for various diagnoses, but Beverly said to me, “I've got pancreatic cancer, and I'm going to die.” We sat together and wept. In the coming days, she gave me instructions, fearful for our two children, nine and fifteen. We updated our wills. And she took the stories she'd written over sixteen years, just for herself, and made copies for the children and her sisters.
She'd written these stories in stolen time, in the mornings after dropping Noah and Hannah at school, before heading to her part-time office job. So they were written in scraps–a paragraph or page at a time, often picked up days later. She described sitting with her laptop on the couch in Hannah's room and welcoming her mother, Idella, and her Aunt Avis. The two sisters had grown up early in the century on a remote farm in Canada and made their way, through many adventures, many relationships with ornery men, to Maine–Idella marrying and raising four girls, Avis getting in and out of trouble. In Beverly's mind, as she typed, the two old ladies would start telling stories, goading each other. She would laugh aloud at what they said or be shocked by what they revealed. Then her time would be up.
At night, as Hannah fell asleep, Beverly read the day's work to me. Eventually, a draft would be finished: some stories came out in days; others took years. Each went through, on average, six drafts. Beverly loved searching for redundancies to cut and moments to expand.
I'm an English teacher, I've loved and studied fiction for forty years, and I knew these stories were the real thing. But Beverly resisted sending them out for publication. As a mother and part-time worker, she had little time and wanted to use it to write and to perfect, not to get derailed into fretting over where to send them and who'd replied or not and why.
But when she died I wanted to publish the stories. It seemed too terrible that they would end up merely as family heirlooms, that her sisters and I would be telling some great-niece how talented her great-aunt Beverly had been and bringing out an old photocopy. It seemed too terrible for her sense of humor, her eye for detail, her ear for talk, and her voice to disappear when they were here, caught in her writing. So when, at Beverly's memorial service, the novelist Jenifer Levin asked what I planned to do with the stories, I told her I hoped to publish them, and she offered to help. Jenifer had taught Beverly in two writing workshops, and Beverly deeply admired her. She and I checked each story for typos and minor inconsistencies, and finally sent out “Wake.” It took six months, but one afternoon I got a call from the New England Review. By then Noah was at college, so Hannah and I celebrated, just the two of us. And a few months later, Stephen King noticed “Wake” and put it into 2007 Best American Short Stories.
There had been another break. When Beverly was dying, her college friend Jennie Torres sent five stories to her ex-sister-in-law, the author Katrina Kenison, who encouraged Beverly to work with an agent. It was too late for that, but when the stories were in good shape, I sent the whole collection to Katrina, who passed them along to the novelist Howard Frank Mosher. Howard is a man of great and generous enthusiasms. He called me out of the blue, comparing Beverly to Flannery O'Connor, and offered to help promote the book.
So allies emerged. Katrina connected me with the agent Gail Hochman who passed the manuscript to Carole DeSanti at Viking. Howard persuaded Elizabeth Strout, whom he'd never met, to read it and made sure Stephen King had a copy of the entire manuscript.
Of course, this process did not happen so easily. Months went by between steps. Publishers hesitated to commit to an author who could not give interviews or provide a second book. The whole process took seven years from the time of Beverly's death.
It succeeded first and last because of the quality of the writing. I had faith that if I persisted, her stories would be recognized. That persistence came from love: love for her, love for the stories themselves, and love for our children and her sisters, for whom this success is so meaningful.
But the love didn't come only from me. I sensed from each of the writers and editors who helped along the way a sort of existential purpose. Each felt a wish to rescue a young woman's spirit from death. There was a generosity and devotion that came out of all these allies, who knew Beverly only a little or not at all, but who saw the meaning in saving her voice and bringing it to the world.
For an excerpt of The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay and to hear Beverly Jensen read, go to www.beverlyjensen.net.
Yippee-ki-yay!
