Leeuwarden Courant turns its readers into photographers with Timepath Voices

Leeuwarden Courant x Timepath Voices

On King's Day the whole region becomes a photo opportunity at the same moment, and no newsroom has enough photographers to cover it. Leeuwarden Courant turned that shortage into an invitation. Using Timepath Voices, the editorial team placed a photo callout directly inside their King's Day article: Deel je leukste foto's met de redactie. Readers answered with their own pictures, and those pictures became the article. Here is how it works.

1. One Question, One Tap

A Voices media callout asks for exactly one thing. Here it was Stuur je foto in! — pick an image, add a caption, done. The whole exchange happens inside the article, with no separate upload page, no account and no email thread to chase. Lowering the effort to a single tap is what turns a reader into a contributor.

2. The Gallery Fills Itself

Every submission flows straight into the callout gallery. The cover shows the photos already shared and a Bekijk galerij button opens the full grid, so the article a reader lands on at the end of the day is richer than the one published that morning.

The part worth stressing: the newsroom did not have to republish anything. The story kept updating itself as the region sent its pictures in.

3. Rights Settled Before the Upload

Reader photos are only useful if a publisher may actually use them, so Voices handles that in the flow rather than afterwards:

• Required consent: a reader confirms they are the author or rights holder before the upload completes.

• Explicit permission: that same confirmation grants the publisher the right to publish, edit and reuse the image on its platforms.

• Editorial control: the newsroom decides whether submissions appear immediately or wait for approval, and whether contributor names are shown.

4. Made for the Phone in the Crowd

Almost every submission arrives from a phone held up in a crowd, so the callout is built for exactly that: a full-bleed cover with the invitation over it, a Doe mee button as the primary action, and a fixed embed height that keeps the surrounding article layout stable. A light and a dark colour mode ship with it, so the embed matches whichever template it lands in.

5. Their Brand, Their Page

The callout carries the newsroom’s brand colour, typeface and language rather than ours, and it runs inside the article on the publisher’s own domain instead of sending readers somewhere else. Voices records the numbers that matter alongside it — views, callouts started, submissions received, completion — so participation can be judged against any other element on the page.

The Final Touch

What makes this work is not the technology, it is the framing. Dagblad van het Noorden did not ask readers for feedback; it asked them for their King's Day. That is a question people want to answer, and Voices makes answering it a single tap.

Every newsroom is sitting on a moment like this one: a day, a street, a storm, a match its audience is already photographing. Voices is the shortest route between those photos and the story.

See the callout as readers saw it: the King's Day photo callout

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