A Scottish company, Scoopt.com, is offering to become an agent for legions of potential citizen photojournalists and videographers.

An excerpt from the company's FAQ:

What is Scoopt?

Scoopt is a media agency that has been created specifically to help members of the public sell photographs and videos of newsworthy events to the press. We bridge the gap between amateur photographer – and by 'amateur', we means anybody with a digital camera or a cameraphone who just happens to be in the right place at the right time – and picture desk.

How does Scoopt work?

When you send Scoopt a photo, you automatically grant us an exclusive worldwide licence to market that photo for a period of three months. During this three-month period, you agree not to publish the photo anywhere else. When the three months are up, the licence becomes non-exclusive. We will still try to sell your photo but now you can also publish it yourself on a photoblog or a picture sharing site -- or anywhere else at all.

However, if we do not believe that we can achieve an immediate sale, we will contact you within 48 hours maximum (usually much quicker) to tell you that we only require a non-exclusive licence. This means that you can publish your photo elsewhere from the outset. We appreciate that you should have the right to share your work; we only ask that you understand that we MUST have an exclusive licence for really hot photos in order to achieve the best possible deal for you.

We sell your photos in three ways:

1. When a photo is really hot – that is, when you have a genuine scoop – we'll get straight on the phone to our extensive network of media contacts. These are the people with the authority and the budget to buy photos for publication. Normally, the photo will first be published in a single publication on an exclusive basis.

2. After this initial publication, we'll do our best to sell the photo again and again on a non-exclusive basis to different publications. The scoop may be over but a photo can still be valuable. How often have you seen the same photo appear in different papers or magazines? Each time it does, the owner gets paid. When you join Scoopt, that could be you.

3. If a photo is not so hot, we'll put it in our gallery of 'stock' photos. This gallery can be seen only by registered members of the media. With luck, your photo will find a buyer somewhere down the line. It may fit a news story of the day or simply make a nice 'filler' picture in a magazine. The money won't be so good... but it's still money for the proverbial old rope.

Each and every time we make a sale, you get 50% of the proceeds.

[Strictly speaking, we don't 'sell' photos at all. Instead, we re-license them for publication in a number of different ways. This is an important distinction because it means the photo remains your property at all times. In legalese, you retain the copyright.]