Fox Television Stations and Fresco News have entered a partnership to share Fresco’s Newsroom Tool Suite with 11 Fox stations across the country, the companies announced Wednesday. The alliance’s goal is to foster citizen journalism at local TV stations.
“We’ve been trying to do this the right way for years, but all that was missing were some ambitious 20-somethings and a simple app,” said Sharri Berg, senior VP news operations, Fox Television Stations.
Fresco is an app available on iOS that links people to TV newsrooms by giving users assignments from newsrooms based on location. The users can go to that location, capture photos or videos and submit that footage to be curated by Fresco’s content team, who circulate to the appropriate Fox station producers. Users receive money if their media is used on-air.
“We built Fresco to harness the real power of citizen journalism,” said John Meyer, CEO of Fresco. “As news consumers, we’re often only given one particular angle to a story because there’s usually only one camera or one reporter on the scene. But with Fresco, there can be multiple witnesses who are recording their own perspective, which adds a new dimension to how stories are presented.”
The Fox-owned stations involved are in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Austin, Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix, Tampa, Charlotte and Orlando. Fresco did a test run with WTXF, Fox’s Philadelphia station, back in February.
