It’s known as the Kate Moss question: how much money would it take for you to shop a famous friend doing drugs to the press? A hundred pounds? A thousand? Ten thousand? Kyle MacRae swears he would never be tempted. “Never. There is no way I am going to whip out a camera phone in that situation. But, believe me, somebody is,” he says. And, when they do, MacRae will be there to broker the deal.
I’m sitting in a hotel overlooking George Square — watching what seems like half of Glasgow bawl into its mobile phone — while the softly spoken 42-year-old southsider explains why his company, Scoopt.com, is set to become a celebrity’s worst nightmare.
“Our society seems to have an insatiable desire for pictures of the famous. Until now the problem has been one of supply. Well, not any longer. There are tens of millions of amateur paparazzi out there with camera phones. If you can only find a way for them to sell their stuff, you have the potential to create something very big.”
The concept behind the website is elegantly simple. Members are required to register, for free. If they take a photograph they think might be newsworthy, they then send it electronically to Scoopt. If the agency agrees it is of interest, it will attempt to sell the picture to a media outlet, with all proceeds being split 50-50 with the photographer.
MacRae describes the idea for Scoopt, which came to him in February last year, as an “in the bath moment”. Coverage of the Asian tsunami indicated the value of amateur photographs to news organisations. The growth of the blogging culture and so-called citizen journalism had shown that members of the public could be as interested in creating news as they were in consuming it. Last, there was the technology. An IT writer by trade, he realised the new breed of two-megapixel camera phones were more powerful than his old digital camera. Eureka.
Like most dotcom ventures it was a step into the unknown. Would such a market exist? Would Scoopt staff get sore fingers from deleting pictures of cats stuck up trees? MacRae and his wife, Jill, put their money where his mouth was, selling their house to finance the start-up and setting up in Glasgow’s Hillington Park Innovation Centre.
On July 4, the website launched. Three days later London was bombed. “At the time, it was disastrous for us,” says MacRae. “Pictures of maimed bodies and people in distress were allegedly making their way onto the internet, and to be associated with that would be bad news both from a business and a personal ethical perspective.”
Many of the most iconic images of the attacks were taken on camera phones, however, in Tavistock Square and on the devastated trains. “Over a longer period, that helped to close the credibility gap and convince people that we had an idea that could work,” says MacRae. Scoopt was picked up by, among others, CNN, Wired magazine and Newsweek. A bandwagon was rolling.
Six months later, MacRae has crow’s-feet from working round the clock, and the site has 5,500 members in 86 countries. More significant, perhaps, are its imitators — sites such as Thesnitcherdesk.com and Cash4yourpics.com. Last week Splash, one of the biggest picture agencies in America, announced that it too was starting a service for members of the public who wished to “snap, send and sell”.
Of course, talking about selling pictures and actually selling them is a different thing entirely, and the scoops of Scoopt have not all been glamorous. The site’s first sale — a photograph of a road accident bought by the Bristol Evening Post — went for what MacRae will only describe as a “two-figure sum”.
But some of the successes appear to have taken even MacRae by surprise: “The highest single-value picture we’ve sold so far was of the new Dr Who monster, Sycorax. A Dr Who fan was watching the filming in June in the Forest of Dean, and this monster came out of the dressing-room trailer, so he took a photograph of it. Then the security men came out and said, ‘no pictures’ and closed the set down.
“We got the picture and sat on it. To be honest I didn’t really know what to do with it. But the photographer was very persistent and kept insisting that it was being talked about on all the Dr Who blogs. Eventually we sold it as an exclusive for £2,000. I was flabbergasted.
“That’s a good example because it was just an opportunistic moment. Nobody was hurt. Nobody killed. No damage done. The photographer made a thousand quid just before Christmas. He was delighted.”
Not so, one imagines, Jodie Kidd: unauthorised pictures of the model’s wedding were sold to The Sun by Scoopt. The American actress Michelle Rodriguez also has cause to rue the agency’s existence. Rodriguez — one of the stars of the second series of Lost — had been snapped drunkenly kissing a barmaid in a New York bar. The shots raised $2,825 (£1,581).
“One of my favourite ones was the David Cameron picture,” says MacRae. “I love this story. It was the day he won the Tory leadership election, the biggest day of his life, so what does he do on the way home? He goes shopping in Tesco.
“One of our woman members stopped him in the aisle, saying she was a fan, and asked to take his picture and he was fine with it. He’s in the alcohol section, with this big beer sign behind his head, and he’s holding up this shopping basket with this great goofy face on.”
The picture was on the front of two national papers the next day and, for her modest troubles, the Scoopt member was almost £1,000 better off. The hardest part of the job for MacRae was convincing her that he had no control over how the papers used the image.
All of which may give ammunition to those who have doubts about unleashing a legion of amateur celeb-stalkers. For all the animosity between celebrities and paparazzi, professional photographers know the rules, where the legal and ethical boundaries lie — even if they sometimes choose to overstep them. The amateurs of Scoopt don’t.
True, the site offers guidelines and has some safety checks built in: all contributors must be over 18; Scoopt will not accept any pictures of children; nor will it take pictures obtained through what MacRae calls an overt breach of privacy (such as breaking into somebody’s house).
But it seems almost inevitable that amateurs will overstep the mark. “They won’t think twice about sticking a camera in somebody’s face,” says MacRae. “Is that something I feel happy about? No. But it’s not something we encourage either.
“It’s a bit like the members of the public who risked their lives to take pictures of the fire at the Buncefield oil depot. Are we encouraging people to throw themselves into burning oil refineries? No. But I’m not saying it’s not going to happen.”
Having demonstrated that the concept behind Scoopt can work, MacRae is now looking to make it pay. One idea is to link up with a mobile phone company and invite members to submit videos to the site.
That, however, is in the future. In the meantime he is not losing sight of Scoopt’s core principle. “I would not want to be Jude Law or Kate Moss in 2006.”
And what hypothetical picture would MacRae love to take himself? “If Roy Keane had a punch-up in Buchanan Street I’d photograph that,” he says. “The only thing is, my own phone doesn’t have a camera.”
