Yahoo (YHOO) and Reuters (RTRSY) hope that the millions of people who own digital cameras and camera phones will work for them as photojournalists.
Starting tomorrow the team are introducing a new effort to welcome photographs and video of news events caught and submitted by the general public. Yahoo News, the most popular news Web site in the United States and Reuters.com will be showcasing the photos and videos submitted as well as distributing some of the submissions next year to the thousands of print, online and broadcast media outlets that subscribe to its news service.
Reuters said it hoped to develop a service devoted entirely to user-submitted photographs and video, according to this NYTimes.com article.
This is the newest facet in citizen journalism joining bloggers, start-up local news sites and global news organizations like CNN and the BBC who have tried to see if readers could also be their reporters.
Yahoo's news division has already borrowed images from their photo-sharing site, Flickr. Submissions will begin being accepted tomorrow and will all appear on Flickr or a similar site for video. Editors at both companies will review the submissions and select some to place on pages with relevant news articles.
The article states that 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. Mr. Ahearn said the company had not yet figured out how to structure those payments. The basic payment may be relatively small, but he said Reuters was likely to pay more to people offering exclusive rights to images of major events. For now, no money is changing hands between Yahoo and Reuters, but if Reuters is able to create a separate news service with the user-created material, it will split the revenue with Yahoo.
Before photographs or videos are used on the Yahoo site or distributed by Reuters, photo editors at Reuters will try to vet them to weed out fraudulent or retouched images.
Read the full article here.
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