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Monday, December 04, 2006

You Witness News

Have Camera Phone? Yahoo and Reuters Want You to Work for Their News Service
"Hoping to turn the millions of people with digital cameras and camera phones into photojournalists, Yahoo and Reuters are introducing a new effort to showcase photographs and video of news events submitted by the public.

"Starting tomorrow, the photos and videos submitted will be placed throughout Reuters.com and Yahoo News, the most popular news Web site in the United States, according to comScore MediaMetrix. Reuters said that it would also start to distribute 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."
I'm going to be very interested in seeing how this works. How will the photographer be credited? How will you be notified if your photo is used?
Starting tomorrow, users will be able to upload photos and videos to a section of Yahoo called You Witness News (news.yahoo.com/page/youwitnessnews). All of the submissions will appear on Flickr or a similar site for video.
Interesting that the submissions will end up on Flickr. Again, I'll wait to see their implementation, but it would make sense to me to allow users to post their photos to Flickr and tag them if they already have a Flickr account. We'll see.
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.
Via [ Steve ]