Scoopt Shuts Down. Here's Why It Failed.

Hmmmm... I think there may be a little more to it than this, but this is a good article on the problems facing the new media/old media challenge.

PDNPulse: Getty Images's Scoopt Shuts Down. Here's Why It Failed.: "Getty Images-owned citizen photojournalism site Scoopt is closing. The small photo agency will stop accepting new images Friday, February 6. At the end of this post is the letter Scoopt sent to members announcing the shutdown.

What went wrong here? Digital cameras and camera phones are wildly popular. Audiences and media companies adore user-generated content. Scoopt had the right technology and a huge distribution network through Getty. Citizen journalism is red hot right now. How come nobody can make a successful business out of it?

To understand why, we need to look at how people behave when they're lucky enough to get a hot news photo. When random citizens snap images of something amazing (like the water landing of a passenger jet in the middle of a major city, for example), some kind of storytelling instinct kicks in. They want to tell as many people as possible, as fast as possible. They may also want to make money off their work, but that can come later. And so they seek out the channels that already reach millions of people: Flickr, Twitter, TV news, newspapers, etc. They aren't going to citizen journalism sites because theses sites aren't as popular. Citizen journalism is still too uneven and too random to attract an audience by itself."