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Reuters and Yahoo! Enlist Camera Phones
eldavojohn writes "In a huge advancement of citizen journalism, Reuters and Yahoo! are asking average people to be journalists with their cell phones. I hope participants don't run the risks others have for photographing the police. You can expect to see these new photos being used at Yahoo! and Reuters.com starting tomorrow." From the article: "'People don't say, "I want to see user-generated content,"' said Lloyd Braun, who runs Yahoo's media group. 'They want to see Michael Richards in the club. If that happens to be from a cellphone, they are happy with a cellphone. If it's from a professional photographer, they are happy for that, too.' Users will not be paid for images displayed on the Yahoo and Reuters sites. But people whose photos or videos are selected for distribution to Reuters clients will receive a payment."
My readon this: For the most part, people won't be paid for their effort, and when they are, Reuters will decide if, when, and how much.
So if the for-profit company that takes money from your effort is not paying people, why would ANYONE send them juicy information, the best and most timely photos? (Other than corporate spin and marketing...) These suits do not understand human motivation at all. While many community/corporate models do work well - they work when the people who contribute significantly get something significant back for their participation in the community.
Stop letting your creativity be yoked by the merchants.
The only possible reason for people to upload is an individul's desire for the story/photo to get out - which puts even more bias on the distorted, biased coporate news process. Now everyone is "fighting" for what news is real - in an arena where people will always lose to the larger corporate profit motive.
Why wouldn't you send it to groups like Indymedia or other groups, collectives and nonprofits that have ideals more in line with the interests of individuals? Why wouldn't you post it to your own flickr account, craigslist, or make a blog post about it yourself? All these tools are available to anyone who can get the API working to upload it to Reuters, and work more in the individual's interest.
We no longer need merchants to control creative expression.
CNN launched a 'thing' like this too a while back (iReport, video)and it was laughed off the airwaves. They wanted you to "be the reporter!" and not pay you for your effort - while the whole time they make money off the ads your reports support. If people have a great story - post the video online with a site that allows you to share revenue from traffic, and includes real rewards for creating the content to those people who really create it.
Well, let's see how well CBS/ABC/NBC/CNN et al are doing: 1) Bush National Guard documents -- fake, 2) Downing Street Memos -- fake, 3) Jason Blair (NYT) articles -- fake. If Fox had been responsibile for any of these great examples of "journalism," they would have already been howled out of business. But of course, that's the beauty of a double-standard. Crucify your opponents over minutia while you skate on the real whoppers.
Honest question: why is this good, but traffic cams and telescreens bad?
Where is the line between "good for justice/democracy/etc" and "invasion of privacy?"
The BBC have been requesting pictures and video from members of the public for some time now. They have a couple of dedicated numbers set up, and also encourage people to email things through the website. I suppose they stand more chance of getting that killer photo with thousands of members of the public looking for it too.
The first time I saw this used was probably the 7/7 attacks in London - many of the first pictures came from mobile phones, and were much more effective at capturing the atmosphere around the photograph than many of the professional photographer's photos.
In a lot of Western countries it is assumed that there can be found a jury of people that haven't yet formed an opinion on some matter. Whether it is civil or criminal doesn't really matter, the issue is that whatever it is, they haven't heard about it.
What publishing cell phone camera photos and movies does is virtually eliminate the possiblity of finding anyone that hasn't been exposed to every possible detail, no matter what.
Another aspect of this is when an "eyewitness" account differs from the rather narrow view of the event presented by a camera. Which would be more likely to be believed? I suspect most people under 30 would unquestingly accept the camera view and people over 30 far more likely to give them equal weight if not be more likely to favor the human. Yes, human memory isn't perfect but neither is the interpretation presented by the cameraman.
And, it is very difficult to tell the difference in the "Internet Age" between something faked and the real thing in a photo when the time between it is taken and when it is old news is like 10 minutes. You either publish it immediately or it has zero value - because everyone else already put it on their web pages. The wire services, AP & Reuters, are having some pretty serious issues with this now, and it is likely just the beginning.
low quality photos are extra easy to edit (as well as editing high res photos then making them look low quality to cover the unrealness) and always sell the best. Maybe they won't buy Oprah edited into a KKK march but anyone could seriously edit any photos taken from a cell phone. They better do video only or something, not that that's much harder to edit with CG and stuff. Stay tuned to Yahoo news for a video of racist, swastika T-shirt wearing Godzilla attacking Israel!
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'