Sharpen your photography and videography skills, Yahoo and Reuters are looking for a way to harness the eyes and cameras of thousands of would-be citizen journalists and to spice up their own image library.
According to the New York Times, on December 5, Yahoo’s You Witness News will accept photos and videos from “citizen journalists.”
Selected content uploaded at Yahoo will be used by both Yahoo and Reuters in their online news stories. According to the NYT article, all submissions will be uploaded to a photo sharing site such as Flickr.
Users will not be paid if their images and video are chosen to illustrate stories at Yahoo and Reuters; however, later in the year, Reuters plans to offer some of the content to their clients, for which citizen journalists will be paid. How much is still to be determined.
I wonder how professional photographers feel about this? I am a great fan of YouTube and Flickr, but my take is that it will be hard to gauge the accuracy of hard news photos and video shot by the general public. And while the editors will look for tampering and other issues, I predict that there will be many cases of fraud and misrepresentation.
Take this YouTube video. We see a man going up the stairs and looking at a door, the cameraman says it is a bank and that this a robber caught in the act. How do we know it is a bank? How do we know it is a robber? How do we know the sirens in the background are police coming for this particular man?
We are all going to have to become more critical consumers of the media, it only gets more wild from here.
Photo by niznoz
(via Lost Remote)
(UPDATE: Very interesting post by Andy Plesser of Beet.TV about the Boston Globe asking for readers to upload pivotal moments in high school football games to their site, using what is destined to appear as a cool tool on Communication Overtones, Videoegg)
