Scoopt: sell news & celebrity photos to the press

Picture the scene. You’re walking around Manchester on a Friday night and come across a drunken Coronation Street star collapsed on the street. Nothing particularly unusual there.

But now there’s a rather neat way to make money. Simply snap the said celebrity on your mobile phone and send the pic to Scoopt by e-mail or MMS and while you enjoy the rest of your evening, they’ll try to sell it as news and split any proceeds with you. You need to have registered first, of course, and it’s worth having their details in your phone’s address book. By the time you wake up on Saturday morning someone else will have beaten you to it.

Of course a proper freelance photographer will want to build contacts with photo desks and to have a go at selling the photo themselves. And many PRs might like to give it away as an act of goodwill. But I can imagine using Scoopt because it’s so simple and once the photo’s been sent you can forget about it. A little while ago I came across Kevin Webster in Boots at a time when he had a big Coronation Street storyline. He had his wife and several kids in tow and looked both bored and hassled. No doubt he wouldn’t have appreciated someone taking a fuzzy photo for The Sun, but that’s the price of fame and it might have made me a few bob.
Related: Scoopt, Telegraph, News of the World… pitfalls of selling photos to the press……Scoopt: now selling camera phone pictures
Contact Stephen Newton