Yahoo And Reuters Want Bigger Picture
If you have a digital camera or a camera phone you can be a photojournalist. That's at least what Reuters and Yahoo are thinking. The two have created a project to bring newsworthy photos or videos to their sites.
You will be able to upload content to You Witness News a section of Yahoo starting tomorrow. Don't quit your day job just yet. According to a New York Times article Yahoo and Reuters will not be paying for user content. Reuters will pay for photos or video that they select to use for their clients. The details of payment have not been finalized. The amount of payment is said to be fairly small.
Nearly half of the phones sold globally in 2006 have a camera built into them according to technology research group Gartner. That is an around 460 million camera phones. The numbers are only going to increase. By 2010 Gartner projects there will be a billion camera phones in use worldwide.
All of the content that is uploaded to You Witness News will also be available on Flickr or another related site. Content that is newsworthy will be placed on pages with related news articles. Yahoo plans to use images it receives for their sports and entertainment sites.
A potential problem with this concept is the quality of the content Yahoo and Reuters will receive. What will the general public view as being news? A cat that is stuck in a tree or the latest car accident does not seem to qualify as major news.
Steve Rosenbaum, who created MTV Unfiltered told the Times "If you are asking your audience to know what is a national news story of interest to the world, it seems to me there are only two results: whether you get flooded with lots of car fires, or you get nothing. Neither is a particularly good effect."
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