Findstringers.com, a division of VeriCorder Technology Inc, aims to provide international newsrooms with the geographical locations and contact details of freelancers signed up to the service, to enable them to form working relationships based on demand.
Founder Gary Symons, who is based in Canada, says once an agreement has been made between the journalist and the company, the click of a button will have the reporter integrated into the newsroom within five seconds.
The technology at the heart of the new service is the company's MIMS (Mobile Integration Management System) Automagic software which allows companies to remotely integrate the work of any journalist who uses VeriCorder's iPhone apps into its network.
Symons told Journalism.co.uk the technology was developed to deal with the issues facing journalists working on digital platforms in remote places, sparked by his own experiences.
"I became very familiar with the freelance world and some of the problems associated with it. Two of the big ones are that you have to find people to hire you, which can be difficult, and secondly if you're taking video, photos or that kind of thing then you've actually got to get your digital material to that person. Way back in the ice age when I was working that was basically putting the film in an envelope and couriering it to somebody but the world works a bit faster now.
"There was one day when I was covering a forest fire and we were being evacuated, the wind had turned and the fire was coming towards us and we all had to scramble up a hill and get in a truck and get out of there. I was trying to haul all this equipment up and basically got caught on a tree, tripped, went over backwards and fell about 50 metres down the mountain. All my stuff went everywhere and while I was stumbling around trying to pick it all up my pants caught on fire."
"Not only did I realise at that point I needed fire-proof pants, but also that I needed to have some better equipment. Out of that I raised some money and developed a mobile reporting tool that at the moment sits on an iPhone platform. Once we built that it was always my intention to make this available to individual reporters who might be full time employees, but also to stringers who might find a lot of difficulty in getting hired and getting their stuff to the newsroom."
Findstringers.com was subsequently developed and will be launched in a beta version later this week at the IBC show in Amsterdam.
Symons added that the site will aim to fulfil a number of roles, from helping freelancers across the world find commissions, providing a marketplace for their work, connecting journalists to newsrooms while protecting secure login details and also the drawing up of contracts of agreements between both parties for added security.
He said the site will be aimed at professional journalists which he hopes will be encouraged by a procedure of recommendations, ratings and subscription fees for non-affiliated freelancers.
"We provide quality by working with associations, unions, schools and professional organizations, and we provide concrete benefits to those groups, and secondly, we provide a rating system," he said.
"In addition, we will obviously have non-affiliated journalists joining. This is actually why we charge a subscription fee for non-affiliates; it creates a barrier to entry for people who might not be serious about the work. As well, because we can't watch every stringer, (although we try) we have a rating system in place, so that a poor or untrained journalist is quickly outed. Essentially, a self-correcting system, where the cream rises to the top."
The site will be available in several languages and aims to build a network of 10,000 freelancers across the globe within the first two years.
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