One thing I’d like to throw into the mix, if I may, is this. It is often assumed that there is a finite ‘pot’ of news out there, that amateurs and professionals will inevitably supply the same material, and that buyers will have to choose between quality and price. But is this really the case? How many local and regional stories occur in every corner of the world every single day and go unreported simply because there are no photographs?

One small example. A couple of weeks ago, a call centre worker who had been sacked the previous day showed up at his old workplace to stage a naked protest on top of the bike shed. A Scoopt member who happened to work at the call centre did precisely the right thing, which is to say he dashed outside and shot a picture on his camera phone just seconds before police removed the man from the roof. Big news? Not remotely! But it WAS newsworthy at the local level. We verified the story – we spoke to the photographer, the call centre and the police – and sold the picture to the local newspaper. The paper paid a professional rate for the pic and ran the story. No competition there between press and public.

From our perspective, that’s what ‘citizen journalism’ is all about. Going forward, many or maybe even most events that we consider newsworthy at some level will be photographed ONLY by members of the public. Indeed, the ready supply of amateur material may well change our definition of what we consider to be ‘newsworthy’. When mainstream news coverage is no longer dictated soley by events that the media selects to cover (because it can) but includes more of what actually happens in the real world, then we’ll have moved on.

Cheers
Kyle

When I look upon the legions of citizen journalists (and now citizen photojournalists)the words of a colleague come to mind; “Just because you can, doesn’t necessarily mean you should.”