December 5, 2006 at 01:00Who wants to be a photojournalist?
The New York Times on Monday wrote about an interesting initiative by Internet giant Yahoo! and the Reuters news agency, which launches on December 5, that is today, the You Witness News project , which is designed to attract ordinary users to create and improve the quality of news.
The idea of the project is based on the fact that hundreds of millions of owners of mobile phones and other compact digital equipment with which you can take photos and videos walk around the Earth today. According to Gartner's technology research group, in 2006, 48% of all phones sold in the world had a digital camera on board, which is about 460 million units. Gartner predicts that by 2010, up to a billion camera phones will be sold annually.
This situation, obviously, creates the widest opportunities for much more expeditious receipt of photo and video materials about current events. We have all seen examples where amateur photography became the basis of news: the Concord plane crashed in France, after which all flights of this aircraft were banned, recent floods in Europe and Katrina hurricane in the USA - the first shots from the scene of these incidents were made precisely by amateurs using simple unprofessional equipment.
In recent years, in the United States, police violence, as well as racist and sexist drunken conversations of various movie stars and politicians in clubs and bars, shot by random passers-by, have made a lot of noise. One such example was Lloyd Braun, head of Yahoo’s media division, when he spoke about the new service: “People don’t say“ We want news created by the audience. ” They want to see Michael Richards [the most recent “lit up” rowdy and quarrel, television star - approx. ed. ] in the club. If the shooting was done with a mobile phone, they are happy. If with a professional camera, we are happy about this too. ”
For such amateur filming, You Witness News was created.. The materials added to it will be duplicated on Flickr and the yet unnamed online video service. The most interesting of them will be selected by editors to supplement the news, on an equal footing with the materials of staff members of Yahoo and Reuters. However, no one is going to pay amateur reporters so far. All that will be due to them is glory.
Time will tell how this service will compete with popular amateur materials batteries like YouTube or Flickr. However, experts agree that with the availability of convenient tools for working with the service and a sufficient amount of advertising, it may well be a great success.
The idea of the project is based on the fact that hundreds of millions of owners of mobile phones and other compact digital equipment with which you can take photos and videos walk around the Earth today. According to Gartner's technology research group, in 2006, 48% of all phones sold in the world had a digital camera on board, which is about 460 million units. Gartner predicts that by 2010, up to a billion camera phones will be sold annually.
This situation, obviously, creates the widest opportunities for much more expeditious receipt of photo and video materials about current events. We have all seen examples where amateur photography became the basis of news: the Concord plane crashed in France, after which all flights of this aircraft were banned, recent floods in Europe and Katrina hurricane in the USA - the first shots from the scene of these incidents were made precisely by amateurs using simple unprofessional equipment.
In recent years, in the United States, police violence, as well as racist and sexist drunken conversations of various movie stars and politicians in clubs and bars, shot by random passers-by, have made a lot of noise. One such example was Lloyd Braun, head of Yahoo’s media division, when he spoke about the new service: “People don’t say“ We want news created by the audience. ” They want to see Michael Richards [the most recent “lit up” rowdy and quarrel, television star - approx. ed. ] in the club. If the shooting was done with a mobile phone, they are happy. If with a professional camera, we are happy about this too. ”
For such amateur filming, You Witness News was created.. The materials added to it will be duplicated on Flickr and the yet unnamed online video service. The most interesting of them will be selected by editors to supplement the news, on an equal footing with the materials of staff members of Yahoo and Reuters. However, no one is going to pay amateur reporters so far. All that will be due to them is glory.
Time will tell how this service will compete with popular amateur materials batteries like YouTube or Flickr. However, experts agree that with the availability of convenient tools for working with the service and a sufficient amount of advertising, it may well be a great success.