“I wanted to hide, I wanted to run, I wanted to go far away,” Cantarella said.

Two months later, she was willing to talk to me about the accident at a coffee shop in western Massachusetts. She was resolute, though, that I not take her picture or shoot video. That’s because Cantarella’s experience with viral fame made her wary of having her image wedded to a traffic accident that would never go away online.

This small anecdote is part of a new media conundrum dogging the relationship between visual journalists and their subjects: most people happily publish their own picture online, but a growing number of them are becoming wary of having their image captured by visual journalists.

With facial recognition software becoming commercially available in the past few years, new technologies could further reshuffle the relationship between a subject and a visual journalist.

Ed Kashi is a renowned photojournalist who has spent the past 30 years shooting for National Geographic, the VII Photo Agency and dozens of other outlets. And, he told me in an email interview, he’s noticed individuals and organizations becoming more reluctant to allow visual access.

“There is more wariness and a desire to have more control over access and what you are allowed to show,” he said. “In some cases and with certain subjects, this new paradigm presents a dilemma and can halt worthy work.”

On balance, Kashi sees the change as positive. “Photojournalists are more accountable,” he said, since the people in the pictures can watchdog for accuracy whether they’re in New York City, Nigeria or the West Bank.

Pulitzer-Prize winning photojournalist Martha Rial, whose career spans over 20 years, agrees that photojournalists have a higher hurdle to get started on projects. “People are aware of how the 24-hour-news cycle has changed the perception of everything,” she told me.

“There’s no denying that it’s getting harder to convince people to allow photographers into their lives in a meaningful, substantive way,” said Jason Cohn, a Pittsburgh-based photographer and videographer, “and there’s no denying it’s for good reason on their part.”

Aside from his work as a photojournalist for outlets like Reuters, Cohn has been a member of his hometown city council since 2005. As a public official, he has become “really wary about photos taken of me, because you never know when a photo will be twisted or turned to be used against you out of context years down the road.”

With a few exceptions like spot news, visual journalists depend on their subjects’ consent. For a subject, that often means ceding control of your own image to a stranger.

Patience, respect and tenacity are the traits that photojournalists are taught to convince a waffling subject to appear in a story. Superlative photojournalists are renown precisely because they can find subjects who allow them to tell visual stories, regardless of obstacles.

How, then, does this wariness affect visual journalism? The problem arises when patience and time are not options visual journalists. That may be because they’re overworked daily journalists who don’t have time to talk their way into a storytelling picture. Or it might be because they are citizen journalists or students without the experience to explain the importance of their assignment. All might be too willing to take the first “no” as the final answer. That stops worthy visual coverage.

New technologies barreling into consumer products have the potential to further sandpaper the relationship between visual journalists and their subjects. That technology is facial recognition technology.

Over the past few years, versions of the technology have moved from law enforcement and big businesses to consumer uses, notably in Facebook and Google Picasa, according to Alessandro Acquisti, an associate professor of information systems and public policy at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University. He made headlines last summer with research showing he could find the name of 31 percent of CMU students who stopped at his research table simply by using facial recognition software and a database of public images from Facebook.

“You will never find me,” one student boasted before the experiment, Acquisti told me. The research team quickly found him thanks to a picture a friend posted.

“The subjects we identified, they were quite surprised,” said Acquisti.

Right now the kind of facial-recognition software Acquisti used for his research needs a frontal, well-lit shot to return a match.

“I’m pretty confident that [the technology] will get better and better over time. Whether it will ever meet or surpass human ability, it’s a difficult question,” says Acquisti.

If the consumer technology does become more powerful, it could have a significant effect on the subjects of news pictures. If a brutal actor like the Syrian government could find the identities of every protester, would it be ethical to take or publish a picture from a demonstration?

Sites like The Chive already feature galleries where they take pictures, sometimes from news or sports events, of women. Would those women want to be casually identified by anyone online? Those and other scenarios create an undeniable logic to not appearing in any news pictures.

Acquisti’s scientific research is more rigorous than the anecdotal wariness some visual journalists see. But “the behavioral economics of privacy,”
as Acquisti calls his research focus, portends a future where the subjects of visual journalism have new incentives to appear or not appear in the media.

“The joke is don’t put anything online that you would not like to have on the front page of the NY Times 10 years from now, because chances are that if you become an important person or you are about to be considered for an important position, that information will resurface.”

Should that message sink in, visual journalists may find themselves trying to fit in to a different equation.

I, like most modern news consumers, have not had much time to actually sit down with the paper product, even through we only get it Thursday through Sunday.

But today, over the breakfast table, we get our fingers dirty with ink print (which I love) and dug in.

I could not ignore the great, diverse photos that filled the paper – the majority of the great shots from staff. So much so, I had to write this post.

In this one, random edition [Saturday, March 5, 2011], I found great photos throughout the sections of the paper. Check them out below… all of them but one are available online.

Back in Libya after decades in exile, a dissident takes on Kadafi
Since his return in late December, a longtime opposition group leader has become more vocal in his denunciation of Moammar Kadafi. But some experts say such groups have been gone too long to be of much help to the rebels in the streets.

Anwar Magariaf fought from abroad against Moammar Kadafi’s rule for more than 30 years. (Rick Loomis, Los Angeles Times / March 4, 2011)

Founder of Crescendo charter schools fired
John Allen is accused of promoting cheating on standardized tests; L.A. Unified closed all six schools in the group.

Just after the charter group’s governing board decided unanimously to fire him as executive director, John Allen, founder of Crescendo schools, leans against a wall. Shortly thereafter, he left the meeting. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times / March 4, 2011)

As L.A. tourism rebounds, tour buses bring noise and gridlock
Residents of Beverly Hills and the Hollywood Hills complain that an increase in tour buses — crowded with photo-snapping visitors — is clogging narrow residential streets.

Reflected in a bus mirror, visitors Sharon Butchart of Uxbridge, Canada, left, and Miriam Leiser of Ramsey, N.J., use headphones to listen to their tour guide. (Liz O. Baylen, Los Angeles Times / February 23, 2011)

Aaron Liberman hopes to lead Valley Torah to a first for Jewish schools
Aaron Liberman and his brother Nathaniel earn kudos for their work ethic as Valley Torah prepares for 6AA Southern Section basketball championship game against Bishop Diego on Saturday.

Brothers Aaron and Nathaniel Liberman after a recent Valley Torah practice in Burbank. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times / March 2, 2011)

Only part of portrait photo, taken by Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times, of ornithologist Peter Harrison is seen in the archive and sadly not available online version: Scientists announce discovery of new species of seabird, the first in 89 years

To be fair, there were some great stories too, especially the ones paired with the photos. From the latest on Libya to California having the highest gas prices in the country to LAPD’s dilemma with Charlie Sheen, a good mix of stories that caught my (limited) attention. My favorite, though, was this piece my wife spotted inside business: Spiders in Mazda cars still a mystery (print headline)

I have to say, this experience reminds me of an incredibly powerful piece by Robert Niles in OJR a few months back: Letting go of the rope: Why I’m no longer a newspaper subscriber.

In it he used the strong imagery of letting go of the rope while someone, who asked for help but failed to do anything to improve their situation, was still holding on. The person on the rope was the newspaper/news industry.

Personally, I think Niles forgot something.

Yes, the news industry needs to do more to get itself out of the situation. But, the only person he saw on the rope, in my opinion, was the leadership.

What I think Niles missed are the hundreds of people trapped under that leadership … the ones that are passionate and believe in the value of their craft… the ones that — even after layoffs, furloughs and bad pay – come to work every day, working long hours to tell the stories of the community in text, photos, videos or whatever form the best they can.

Journalists that are as frustrated as Niles, but are trapped under that leadership. Journalists that choose not to let go of the rope. Journalists that are trying to do what they can with what they have … in most cases, “more with less.”

Don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot of crap too (Check out Churnalism.com). There is a long way to go to make this better. I’m also as frustrated as Niles is with the leadership.

But I can’t lump the great, good or even mediocre work journalists do across the country every day and night with the bad leadership and poor business decisions that have undercut them and our industry.

I’m just a weekender, and for this one edition, I’m glad we re-subscribed.

Robert Hernandez is a Web Journalism professor at USC Annenberg and co-creator of #wjchat, a weekly chat for Web Journalists held on Twitter. You can contact him by e-mail (r.hernandez@usc.edu) or through Twitter (@webjournalist). Yes, he’s a tech/journo geek.

I’ve been using Picnik to edit photos on my Mac, which does not (at least yet) have the desktop version of Photoshop installed. I’ve found it quite useful, though limited when compared with the full version of Photoshop. I wanted another tool to compare with Photoshop Express and Picnik, and recalled Splashup, another online photo editing tool that looks much more like the familiar desktop version of Photoshop than anything else I’ve seen online.

All three tools are free and require no special downloads or installations, save for the ubiquitous Flash browser. Here are my notes on the three, followed by a handy features chart and my conclusions on how Photoshop Express matches up.

Picnik

Picnik does not require a user to register in order to use its photo editing tools, though Picnik does offer a premium for $25 a year that gives you access additional type fonts as well as to levels and curves tools when editing your photos.

Picnik works within the existing browser window, without spawning a pop-up and offers an easy-to-use interface with text labels for its tools, not icons. That makes Picnik especially easy to use for novices, and support for multiple languages is available. Basic phot editing tools – crop, resize, color and exposure adjustment and sharpen – are available under the “Edit” tab, while more advanced image manipulation features, including the addition of text and graphic elements, are available under the “Create” tab. Despite what that tab implies, however, I couldn’t find a way to create a new image file using Picnik; I could only edit ones I (or someone else) had created elsewhere.

This is a tool for picture editing… and that’s it. There’s no photo storage option, although Picnik allows you to save edited images to your account on Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Photobucket, Webshots and Myspace, as well as to your hard drive. You can open images from those locations, as well as from any URL on the Web. You even can do a Yahoo! photo search from within the Picnik website, in order to find more pictures to edit. (No longer does one have to bother downloading images to your computer in order to edit swiped photos anymore.)

Splashup

Splashup looks more like an older, simpler version of the classic Photoshop desktop program. Like Picnik, it offers but does not require registration. But it does spawn a pop-up window for its Flash picture-editing application.

Here, you use the top-of-the-window menu bars and familiar toolbars that you’d use in the old Photoshop. You can open images from your computer, as well as from Flickr, Facebook, Picasa or another URL on the Web.

Splashup offers more editing functions than Picnik, as well as the ability to create a new image file. This makes the site a handy resource for someone who wants to create a few simple Web graphics, without the expense of buying a full-fledged graphics program, such as Photoshop or Adone Illustrator. Of course, Splashup provides nowhere near the functionality that one would find in those tools, but those tools (when used legally) certainly can’t beat Splashup’s price.

Splashup also was the only one of the three online tools I worked with that supported layers, as well as the ability to use the “lasso” tool to define and grab part of an image for use in another. But it lacked a red-eye removal tool which the others did have, as well as a simple-to-use “auto correct” function.

Which brings us to…

Photoshop Express

Photoshop Express made most sense to me when I stopped expecting it to be just like Big Daddy Photoshop, and decided instead to view this tool as basically Picasa with some handy photo editing tools attached. Think of it as the flip side of Splashup, where the editing seems the focus and the storage the afterthought.

Adobe requires you to create an account and sign in to use Photoshop Express. From there, like on Picasa, you can create albums and upload photos. In addition to uploads from your computer, Photoshop Express supports instant import from Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa. Once uploaded, you can click on your pictures to edit them, but you cannot export the image into a different file type once you’ve finished editing. If you uploaded a JPG, it’s gonna stay a JPG.

Photoshop Express uses a user-friedly mix of text and icons to label its tools, of which there are many for color, exposure and focus correction. When you choose a tool to work with, you can’t select specific attribute values with the tool, as you can with other tools. Instead, Photoshop Express generates several modified versions of the original image, in thumbnail form, from which you can choose the one that represents the altered value you want, such as hue, saturation or focus. It’s very easy to use for someone who has not worked with attribute values and simply wants to pick something “darker,” for example.

In summary, I didn’t find any functionality in Photoshop Express that Web users didn’t already have available to them in Picasa, Picnik and Splashup. Photoshop Express would be the best option for people who wanted a single tool that combined free online photo storage with novice-friendly photo editing functionality. If using two websites isn’t a problem, I found Picnik’s tool more powerful and user-friendly than Photoshop Express. Then you can upload and store your photos on Picasa, Flickr or anywhere else you’d like.

Would you use any of these in an online production environment? When I’m shooting with a decent quality SLR camera, I don’t find that I need the basic image correction that’s possible with these free online tools. But when using a cheaper digital still camera, having the ability to color correct, eliminate red eye and sharpen an image with a free, easily accessible online tool is a nice option to have. And I think that Splashup’s graphical tools are useful for students and novices who want to try a few simple graphics, without having to invest significant coin in a full-function solution such as Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator first.

One-man band

The increasingly popular one-man news bureau – a solo journalist who gathers news using multimedia tools – should leverage each medium to further engage the reader, said Sites.

In September 2005, Sites became Yahoo News’s first original content correspondent, pioneering the “one-man band.” Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone showcased an ambitious undertaking: a one-year trip to all the major conflicts zones around the world reported by Sites, with video, text, and still photography.

Carrying over 60 pounds of equipment, Sites leveraged each medium’s unique strengths to tell his stories. Video was for the “inherent drama,” the “motion” of the world – capturing verbs like dancing, singing, talking, exploding. Text was for “nuance,” the “details that bring a story to life.” Still photography was reserved for portraits to create a powerful “connection to someone’s face,” explained Sites.

Reporting simultaneously in three dimensions is “not a replacement for mainstream media… but an amplification of it,” said Sites. By putting a human face on the global conflicts and “stringing those stories together so that when you see them online, perhaps collectively, cumulatively, they provide a greater idea of what’s happening in that conflict zone.”

Sites views news in new media as not the “last word… but the first word” to pull the reader into the story. “The computer that delivers news is also a tool for you to respond to the information.” Under the intimate portraits and videos of ordinary people caught in war, Sites provided links to the chronology of the conflict (BBC country profiles) and to possible solutions (NGOs and political organizations).

The site drew two million viewers a week. Sites’ workload was heavy: Spending about ten days in each war zone, he transmitted a 600-1,200-word story, five to 15 photographs, and two to three videos every day.

“In some ways I felt that doing this project was a bit of penitence for my journalistic sins of past,” said Sites.

He was referring to November 2004. While covering the battle of Falluja as a pool correspondent, Sites shot a highly controversial video of a U.S. Marine shooting and killing a wounded, unarmed Iraqi insurgent stretched out on the ground of a mosque. Most international networks ran the full tape. All the American networks blacked out the shooting.

“It was absolutely the wrong decision,” recounted Sites, who supported censoring at the time. He explained, “That videotape to me had the potential of creating more bloodshed,” and that conflicted with the journalistic ethic of minimizing harm.

“We failed the public,” Sites admitted. “It wasn’t the government. It wasn’t the military… We censored ourselves.” Subsequently, Sites wrote a 2,500-word open letter to the Marines involved in the shooting on his blog, retelling the story of the shooting and putting it in context. That piece was picked up by newspapers and TV stations around the world.

“What that demonstrated to me was the power of online media in telling a more complete – and sometimes more accurate story than traditional media,” said Sites.

Focus on characters

After Sites’ return from the Hot Zone (and a year off scuba diving to decompress), he and Yahoo continued their foray into original reporting in May 2007, albeit with a dramatic change of subject. “People of the Web” is a series of articles and four to four-and-a-half-minute videos featuring people who use the Internet to “bypass the traditional world.”

He profiles people who circumvent traditional approaches to acting (lonelygirl15), music (bands on MySpace), and art (Phil Hansen).

“What I wanted to do was reach into the computer, and pull out that human being,” said Sites. He looks for stories that contain a strong Web component, a colorful central character, a compelling visual, and an element of social relevance.

For example, Hansen, an X-ray-technician-cum-artist became famous not through galleries, but by broadcasting his art-making process via YouTube. His art is interactive. One particularly impressive project – on a ten-foot, circular canvas-wheel canvas – was created with the words of his viewers. Hansen asked people to write him a moment that changed their lives. Each letter appears as a tiny dot on the canvas, but the blended result was that of a picture of the artist’s own face, cradled by four hands.

Sites said that he’s beaten the mainstream media on most of these stories. Fox News, for example, reported on an online dating service for farmers after Sites covered it.

Reporting in color

The media of video, print and photography contain finer shades that journalists could explore, Sites said.

Within solo journalist broadcast reporting, for example, are at least four techniques that “don’t compete with each other,” demonstrated Sites. Each technique offers a subtly varied angle ranging from micro-view to macro-view.

First, in a traditional first person stand up, the reporter holds the camera at arm’s length and films himself speaking over events in the background. A variation of this technique is one in which the reporter does not himself appear on camera. In both cases, the solo journalist can pan the scene using himself as the center, turning in place, and drawing a circle with his arm and camera.

A third technique uses POV plus nat sound. Sites showed an example of a video of a Sudanese woman singing a rebel fight song to lull her malaria-stricken baby to sleep.

Using a fourth technique that Sites calls “post-impressionistic narration,” the reporter provides a sort of director’s-cut commentary. He watches a video with the viewer, talking over the footage. The time lapse and informal narration offers a macro-view of the events on screen.

“Everyone talks about the Internet as the death knell for newspapers,” Sites said, “No, it’s TV that’s really bad online.” Whereas newspaper websites have become great sources of info, Sites said – they just need to learn how to monetize the Web – Sites criticized local TV websites for simply parking their aired stories on the Internet.

When asked if offering so many retellings of the same event would over-saturate the viewer, Sites replied, “It’s a matter of palette… It makes the journalist work harder.” And in the end, it benefits the viewers and the sources.

“The mediums are not displacing but enhancing each other, playing off each other in ways that are relevant,” Sites said. “TV didn’t kill radio. It transformed it.”

But since Nov. 16, 2005, New York city-based MediaStorm has gathered force in its second coming as a multimedia journalism website, winning accolades and awards. OJR spoke to Brian Storm about how his boutique media company continues to crank out high-quality journalism.

OJR: What was the impetus for taking a fresh look at MediaStorm in 2005?

Storm: I looked at the landscape and I remembered vividly in 2000 when broadband penetration at home was 10 percent. But by 2005 or 2004, we actually hit 50 percent of the online households where broadband enabled, and that’s a sea change. You remember surfing with dial up. That was a different experience. Now it’s always connected. Broadband gives you real video speed.

The other thing that I was noticing was the desire for video advertising. Madison Avenue now was looking at the Web saying “Pre-roll video ads are a big deal,” to the tune of $275 million business in ’05 looking to go to $640 million in ’07, looking to triple in ’09 to $1.5 billion. I think those estimates are low. I think it is going to grow faster and bigger than that.

The other thing I noticed was there was a supply problem. Everybody was saying, “look there is demand to place these video ads but there is no content to place it against.” There was no inventory. And if you look at circulation going down and fragmented television programming, and about viewers moving to the Web, now all of a sudden you have Madison Avenue wanting to place $25 dollar CPM video ads in front of content. This is a huge financial opportunity that just didn’t exist a couple of years ago.

The other thing that has happened is what I call the democracy of production. So you think about things like this magic box that we are sitting next to. This is a Mac with 3 terabyte hard drive in it. I mean, it comes with a seatbelt. It’s a multimedia powerhouse machine. This is like a Hollywood production facility that we are sitting in front of in my apartment. And it’s not that expensive. Final Cut Pro is 1,200 bucks. And it’s like a Avid system that used to cost $250,000. HD video camera used to be $70,000. Now they are $5,000. I own a HD video camera, man.

So that’s the democracy of production–that’s a revolution in my mind.

So I wanted to get back to my publishing roots, frankly. I had seen a lot of great projects and I felt like I had developed a model for financing and producing and creating them. And I felt completely empowered because of production tools because the way the medium has matured.

It was just the right time to do it… to start this thing again.

OJR: You said you had developed a model for financing. How are you financially staying alive in the middle of Manhattan with four employees and putting out publication that is really about socially aware journalism?

Storm: How do you do that? You cash in on your relationships and you go build really high-end stuff for big name brands.

The Los Angeles Times hired us to produce a Gail Fisher project. It’s called “Blighted Homeland” it’s about Navajo living in Monument Valley where they’ve been doing all this uranium mining and so the people you know have been affected adversely because of that the mining. We’ve produced this project for the LA Times.

OJR: So their photographer collected the audio you worked with them to produce this?

Storm: Exactly, Gail actually came to New York stayed in our guest room–we have a guest room exactly for that reason. And Pam Chen produced this project. And I do the oversight.

Early on, MSNBC.com hired me to produce video projects for a magazine called “Take 3″ which was targeted at baby boomers. There was the story about “The Vanishing Americana” about the “Milk Man” and it was laden with sexual innuendos; it was really funny.

And then we did a piece called “The Sandwich Generation” which is also now on our site but we first produced it for MSNBC. It was at the level at which I want MediaStorm projects to be so it was also on MediaStorm.

Plus we do a lot of consulting. It’s standard interactive Web stuff but most companies don’t have teams that can produce that for them.

The other thing we are doing is that we really are acting as a multimedia agency. And I am really excited about this element.

There is the technology that we deployed for them so we work as both a consultant and a production arm. We help them tell the story but we also help them get up to speed with doing video.

OJR: Tell me about the auction model you tried out for selling a project last year?

Storm: I sent an e-mail out to 25 key clients inviting them to participate in a private auction to license the exclusive right to premier “Iraqi Kurdistan.” So the premier was auctioned off eBay-like. So what happened is I actually had ability for people to write their name, and publication, their e-mail address, their bid amount, and they’d hit send, and that would come to my cell phone in my e-mail and I would say yes, approve it. So we now have a template for doing digital auctioning of editorial content where we are allowing the client to drive the price up. I mean, I could have said $10,000. I could have guessed what that that’s what it was worth. It was far better to let the industry sort of decide. You know I mean that’s the key issue. Producing great content and trying to get it to the right publication and you get paid an appropriate fee to do it. I mean that to me seems to be the Holy Grail of trying to do these kinds of stories.

OJR: With the ability to route your content to TiVo over cable, you are poised to be a broadcast company…

Storm: In my mind we already are a broadcast company. We have this unique place on the web right now that we can do pretty much anything we want to do. I can publish any story I want. I know the next nine projects that we are going to produce for MediaStorm. I am sitting on 200 stories right now. Thirty of which I would love to produce for this site.

OJR: Your roots are of a photo editor… how do you see the Web’s impact on photojournalism?

Storm: So with this idea of a photojournalist going in and taking a picture but also doing audio reporting, we can give our subject a voice and I think that that is such a critical element. That changes the equation.

Most of us as photographers, we got into this because we didn’t want to write. We love journalism but we wanted to tell the story through photography. And because we are not necessarily great writers, the thing that’s so beautiful about sound is that we don’t have to write the story we can let the subject write it for us. And it’s just refreshing to hear the subject of a story tell you their story as opposed to some beautiful television person telling you… standing in front of the situation saying this is what you should be seeing and what you should be thinking. I don’t feel we need that.

I always describe it as documentary photojournalism meets National Public Radio. It’s like a combination of the fly on the wall of “This American Life” and the story telling approach they take meeting the sort of fly on the wall hands off approach that we take as a documentary photographers.

OJR: What does that say about just journalism in general? There is no more division of labor… the photographers, the print reporters, the radio reporters, the television reporters…. You have to be good at multiple things?

Storm: That’s the trend but for economic reasons and that bums me out. It shouldn’t be an economic decision.

What we should be doing in journalism is figuring out the very best way to tell a story. There’s division of labor on a breaking news story, where you’ve got people doing multiple things to try to meet the deadline. That’s one form of news.

The stories I work on are long term. The difference is that these photographers are authors. Only Olivier Jobard was on the story with “Kingsley’s Crossing.” He spent six months of his life on that story. Now if we would have had the resources to send a crew on that story, I think it would have changed the intimacy of it.

So I think there is a fine line between our just redoing this because it is just flat out cheaper to not send a sound guy.

OJR: Right, so you’ve been in this field for about 14 years. What’s really surprised you with MediaStorm about audience feedback? Enthusiasm for this kind of work?

Storm: Honestly it’s not surprised me that the “audience” has responded, because this medium is completely different from television, for example. The television has a signal that they send out there and they have to homogenize it frankly, because what they are trying to do with that one signal is trying to get as many people to watch it. So therefore they get stories on Britney Spears’ belly button because that’s going to give you more numbers.

The Web is completely different. I can have thousands of stories on my website and its exact opposite mentality which is I want to do a story about AIDS that will stand the test of time because those sort of affinity groups will find it and promote it. You will find people promoting “Bloodline” off their blog or off a foundation site or charities. They want advocacy work to be able to get people to be inspired and act and give.

There are a lot of interesting things about the way the audience is different. About 70 different countries hit our website. How do they find us? It’s all word of mouth. We don’t do any marketing. It is all viral conversation and its exact opposite of broadcast. When we launched on November 16, 2005, maybe 500 people watched our project that day. Today there are thousands of people watching those same projects who have never seen it before right so the whole time-shifting capability is really critical to this medium.

I wouldn’t say things have surprised me I think what they have really done is to encourage me to believe what I always believed about people: that they really do care and they do really want quality stories. I think mainstream journalism isn’t always set up to deliver that. They’ve got to feed the beast. They’ve got to shoot for numbers. The biggest problem with big journalism right now is answering to shareholders, instead of to their readers. They are trying to drive a profit margin at twenty seven percent instead of saying let’s invest in journalism and you know satisfy and gain readership. They are answering to the wrong matrix in my mind.

I hope this is just one example of the kind of company that is going to say that it’s time to take journalism back. I know I’m not going to make a pot of money with MediaStorm. I’m not going to. I’m just continuing to do stories that I believe in.

You know that’s that whole living a rich lifestyle thing. You know making money is a necessary evil to stay in business but it’s not our focus. It’s not like any of us got into journalism to make tons of money. We got into journalism because of the experiences—the rich lifestyle.

OJR: Nicholas Kristof, a columnist at the New York Times, recently invited readers to “tell the story” using the material he has gathered with his producer Naka Nathaniel on a trip to Darfur. What are your thoughts on audience participation-–helping with the process of production?

Storm: Well that to me, honestly, sounds like a gimmick–and that’s what that is. But if that gimmick gets more people to care about, and learn about, and understand what’s going on in Darfur, I’m for it.

I think citizen journalism is incredibly exciting because we need to engage the audience. We just do and getting them to tell their own stories or to comment on a story. I think that’s super important and valuable. I think we as professional journalists have to contemplate what that means. Breaking news is really not for us any more because there are going to be tons of people on the scene. We need to be the people who come in with our rich journalism skills and do the definitive story… the story of record if you will.

You can see more MediaStorm projects at http://mediastorm.org. Brian Storm can be reached at brian [at] mediastorm.org.

“Backpack” journalism? How old fashioned. My newsroom is in my pocket.

I may have literally picked up the future of journalism while in London this fall. For the past two months I have field-tested a cell phone so sophisticated it defies that name. It’s the forerunner of a new generation of convergence device that could change the way we do our job.

I came to the UK to shepherd a class of Missouri School of Journalism students for four months while they learned how the rest of the world gets its news.

The trip gave me the opportunity to scratch one of my biggest technology itches. When I went to Korea a few years ago, I saw a society that was rapidly moving away from the laptop computer and toward hand-held super cell phones. But between the language barrier and my own awe, I never really figured out why the Koreans could watch video on their phones and I could only check my voice mail.

The answer to my question came from Mark Squires, head of communications for Nokia UK. Rather than give me a technical answer, he reminded me that it’s “Knock-y-ah” and handed me an impressive chunk of aluminum, silicon and glass. It looked something like Spock’s tricorder.

The Vulcan’s machine only worked in three dimensions, however. This N93 is on paper a 3G (Third Generation) cellular telephone. But in fact it shoots high quality still and video photos, displays them for you on a 2.4-inch active matrix screen or connects to a standard television, downloads any Web page you want, produces copy on Microsoft Word, displays your presentations on PowerPoint, keeps your expense account on Excel, opens that e-Book on Adobe Reader, records the mayor’s speech in digital audio, phones Mongolia free on Skype, polishes your shoes and teaches your kids Latin.

Well, maybe not the last two. But it does include a bar code reader if you are ever curious about those thick and thin lines.

I’m not a technologist, but I proudly speak basic Geek. Nevertheless, I was overwhelmed. Maybe hyperwhelmed.

The N93 is Nokia’s latest attempt to pack the whole technology world into a pocket-sized package. It is the big brother of the N90, a lighter and simpler camera-cum-telephone that has made American inroads and which several of my students gleefully tested.

In fact, a super telephone is just a pocket or purse away on any London street. People here can buy 3G telephones at any of the Orange, Carphone Warehouse, O2 or T-mobile shops that occupy every other doorway on High Street. As you watch the world go by from the second deck of a bus, the people around you check their e-mail or text messages, share photos, find a map to a restaurant or listen to music.

Yes, listen to music. The techno world predicted that video messaging would be the killer app for 3G. But the iPod generation discovered the system allowed them to download music or even music videos to play through the phone.

The N93 has a dandy MP3 player as well as an MP4 player for your videos. But I’m old fashioned – I liked the built-in FM radio.

As much as I loved to play with the buttons on the slick little machine, my job was to see if it had a future in the journalism world.

It does. And it will only get better as Nokia, Samsung and the other cellphone wizards improve the concept by making smaller and lighter units

Calling wonder boxes like the N93 a “cell phone” is a misnomer. They are advanced communications devices with telephony thrown in – more like a little laptop that can call home.

We are still installing a 3G network in the United States and it will be some time until it is ubiquitous. Japan and Korea are so far ahead they are looking at 4G and the European cell system upgraded to that level some time ago.

What are we are missing out on with our clunky second generation cell phones? Incredible bandwidth, for one. The 5 Mhz frequency of 3G allows 384 kbps from mobile systems and a blazing 2Mbps from stationary systems. This means mobile video calls are a reality. But it also means that we in the information world can burst tons of data back to the office and even stream video from our phone.

But that’s in the future for most of the U.S. And it’s not why I’m excited by a 4×6-inch device.

Even without the capacity of 3G, the N93 allows journalists to do almost everything they would with a host of other appliances. The phone comes with two cameras. The “ordinary” low-rez camera comes on when you flip open the phone, letting you see your own smiling face until you launch a video call.

But more significant is the 3.5 MP camera with a 3x optical zoom that tops the N93. Both my students and I used the camera to shoot everything from crowds to portraits to landscapes in London. We sent side-by-side test shots back to the Mizzou photojournalism department and found they were as sharp as those from my Canon A520 (usually in my other pocket) and quite usable for print and online reproduction.

It’s the video, however, that astounds. It records and plays at full VGA – 640 x 480 pixels – at 30 frames per second. One UK reviewer said the resolution combined with the optics competes with almost every amateur camcorder on the market. And we are not talking about brief clips here. Pop a miniSD chip into the expansion slot and you can shoot a 90-minute feature.

A journalist with only an N93 can then go to a coffee shop, edit the feature with the included Adobe Premiere software and send it to the office.

Oh, yea. Not having a 3G connection is less of a problem than it sounds. The N93 has built-in Wi-Fi.

Despite all that, I wasn’t ready to go into the field without my trusty PowerBook until I discovered the Microsoft Office suite and the ability to hook to a portable keyboard via Bluetooth or USB 2.0.

I didn’t have a keyboard available in London. But I once had one for my now-retired Palm Pilot. I loved the ability to pull the Palm from one pocket and the folded-but-full-sized keyboard from another and type for hours. The smaller screen is really not bad for text entry and becomes second-nature quickly. Remember, half the world communicates by text-messaging on even smaller screens and 10-key pads.

At this stage in the technology’s development, using a device such as the Nokia N93 is not yet a perfect solution for the journalists. There are many times when a bulky camera, a powerful computer or a sophisticated digital audio unit is needed. The N93 is chunky for a phone (about 6 ounces) but lighter than the combined pieces of equipment it replaces.

Squires said the larger size of business cell phones is less of a problem in Europe than in the U.S. Purchasing cell phones at face value instead of via a calling plan is so common that many people have multiple units. He has a wafer-thin “evening phone” to which he transfers his SIM when the workday is done, similar to a woman who exchanges her shoulder bag for an elegant clutch for an evening at the theater.

But I’d put up with the size. I will whimper when I give my loaner N93 back to Nokia and will have the $699 gadget on my wish list. I’m looking forward to the day I always work from a pocketful of technology.

My dream scenario is walking into a neighborhood in jeans and sweatshirt, an N93 in one pocket and a keyboard in the other. Sans my tell-tale computer bag and camera, I think I could be just one of the boys as I developed my contacts. And when the time came, I could record audio clips of background sounds, take a few photos of the street corner crowd then shoot a video clip of that great old codger. Back at the café, I could type my story, file it to the office and amble into the sunset.

Now that’s new media journalism. And who knows how we will do journalism when Nokea gets to the N203? Beam me up.

This dream of a global photo album, compiled in real time by amateur and professional shooters, hasn’t quite materialized, but photo-sharing services such as Flickr and Buzznet are giving us glimpses into that future.

New York Times Magazine columnist Rob Walker is using Flickr to compile nationwide views of the various Martin Luther King boulevards, while Boston Globe technology editor DC Denison used Flickr photos to illustrate a story in the paper. About 15 newspaper sites have created special Buzznet sites to showcase citizen photos of current events or hyper-local happenings. And the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle’s Spotted citizen photog section even has an army of 20 interns who cover parades and high school football.

These are baby steps toward what might become a revolution in visual journalism — broadening the variety of images we see on news sites and in print publications to include more than just traditional photojournalism. With these photo-sharing communities comes an inner view of the lives of the people in our neighborhoods — and a way to connect folks who like snapping photos at celebrations, who are fanatic about species of birds, or who can capture the mood on the streets.

“The thing about Flickr and Buzznet and all these sites is that they grew out of the exploding ease and efficiency for individuals to document their world and use images as a cheap form of connectivity to friends and loved ones,” said Xeni Jardin, co-editor of group blog BoingBoing. “That basket of sites and services came out of an amateur experience — it’s not a profit-driven experience. And there will be new services growing out of this idea of news organizations using stuff from real people, images from the man on the street. They used to go out with a mike and a camera to get that, but they might not have to do that in the future.”

Walker, who pens the “Consumed” column for the Times Magazine, was attracted to Flickr because of its decidedly non-commercial bent. He had long been curious if his stereotype of Martin Luther King boulevards — “an awful lot of abandoned property, scary-looking bars, and small groceries that accept food stamps” — was really accurate. Even though there had been newspaper specials and a book on the same subject, Walker believed there was a place for an ongoing, open-ended, “open journalism” view of MLK boulevards.

“I’m already a journalist, I can already write something with my point of view,” Walker told me. “With Flickr, I can say here’s an interesting subject, and throw it open to others. … I think there’s an advantage to having it open-ended, because I could have an unlimited number of people contributing to this in an unlimited number of places over an unlimited amount of time.”

So far, the project includes 70 photos from five U.S. towns, including shots Walker took in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina. Eventually, Walker might consider making a book of the photos or a website preserving the collaborative aspect of the project. But because Flickr is a series of self-started communities, Walker must tread lightly when trying to recruit more participants.

“Flickr is a real community and you don’t want to come storming in and say, ‘Everybody do as I say.’ It doesn’t work like that,” Walker said. “There are a lots of people doing interesting things there, and I want to respect that. What I’m leading up to is to send messages to everybody who might be interested, saying I like your stuff and would like you to join this, if you’re interested.”

Research, conferences and citizen photogs

While Walker works on his project outside the confines of conventional journalism, the mainstream media are also trying to figure out how photo-sharing communities can augment their own photojournalism.

Denison at the Boston Globe used Flickr to find photos from the Supernova tech conference to illustrate a print story about the conference. He made sure to get permission from the shooters, and ran their photos in a strip like a contact sheet (see image). The photos had to run at a smaller size because they weren’t at the best resolution for print. The Flickr photos led Denison to some blog entries, and soon he was getting a fuller experience of the conference without leaving his computer monitor.

Denison also has used Flickr as a research tool for Boston.com’s innovative Pulse Points project, which provides free Wi-Fi hotspots as well as hyper-local online content keyed to that area.

“I’m currently talking to a resident of Roxbury Crossing, for example, about how we might use his photos on the Roxbury Crossing Pulse Point,” Denison told me via e-mail. “Pictures by a resident can mean a lot more than pictures by a photographer who just drops in for an hour or so. Of course I also have access to some really wonderful photos taken by Globe staff photographers, and that imagery, to be honest, is on an entirely different level, usually. So I use that first. But I also check Flickr because it gives me an idea of who’s going through the area regularly, or who lives there, and what they find interesting enough to photograph.”

Rather than mine existing photo-sharing communities, some newspaper sites have set up their own citizen photography micro-sites. Buzznet, a competitor to Flickr that has roots in the music scene, has licensed its technology to 15 newspaper sites, including a six-site trial with Knight Ridder Digital.

Marc Brown, Buzznet founder and president, told me there’s been a growing interest among newspapers to do more community journalism and get user-generated content onto their sites. Brown helped set up Buzznet sites for the Houston Chronicle for Hurricane Rita coverage, the Miami Herald for Hurricane Wilma coverage, and the Biloxi (Miss.) Sun-Herald for Hurricane Katrina. He explained the business deals he’s done with media sites so far.

“Generally it’s a monthly license fee, and a revenue split for advertising,” Brown said. “The way we do these partnerships is that the people who sign up to do galleries and contribute photos become part of Buzznet, the larger community that extends beyond their geographic community. The Roanoke Times has groups for Virginia Tech football and one for the NASCAR race they have in Roanoke. Plus there’s a general Roanoke, Va., gallery and they promote it in the paper.”

The Augusta Chronicle has gone even further, developing its own citizen photography site, Spotted, and then hiring 20 unpaid photography interns who fan out to cover smaller community events untouched by the pro shooters. The interns hand out cards for Spotted so people can go to the site to see the photos.

Chronicle new media director Conan Gallaty says the initiative has been a stunning success. The site has 200 active community participants who upload a stream of photos, the interns get coached by staff photographers, and the micro-site is getting 1 million page views per month. That traffic now represents 20 percent of the newspaper site’s total traffic.

But the Chronicle has done more than just open up a site and hope for participation to materialize. They’ve created a vibrant ecosystem of photographers in Augusta. Amateurs can upload all the photos they want, and interns (mainly students and retirees) can shoot events and get school credit for their work, perhaps moving up to the professional ranks eventually. Spotted has become a haven for teen visitors and participants, who want to see photos from high school football games, Gallaty said.

The Flickr conundrum

While Buzznet, with 150,000 registered users, has reached out to media companies, Flickr, with 1.5 million registered users, has not. In fact, the leading photo-sharing community is now owned by Yahoo, a company that’s increasingly competing with media companies, making joint ventures more complex.

Tom Kennedy, managing editor of multimedia for WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive, told me his company was exploring the use of photo-sharing services such as Flickr, perhaps customized for its sites.

“[Our projects might be] more aligned with visual anthropology more directly than photojournalism as it has classically been defined,” Kennedy said. “What you find on Flickr is more personal vision than photojournalism. What interests me is whether it can be meshed with other photojournalism projects to garner more audience interest for visual communication. Photojournalists see themselves as the tip of the iceberg, but the shape of the iceberg changes because of this. They may well remain as the tip, but perhaps this makes it so you can see below the water line and find other useful visual information.”

One big issue when a media company wades into Flickr and its ilk is the need to verify the photos and the shooter’s right to a photo. Was it a hoax, or retouched in Photoshop? Was it lifted from a professional or stock photo site? Building in this layer might be difficult in the freewheeling Flickr, which provides an opening for a rival service that could include the technological underpinnings for vetting photos and filtering them.

But some quasi-journalistic projects on Flickr, such as the MLK Boulevards project or one on Global Poverty, might be better off with less oversight and editorial control.

“I’m interested in the idea of [MLK Boulevards] belonging to the people who contributed and not belonging to an organization that is somehow in charge and might have some specific deadlines or needs,” Walker said. “It would become less organic, and the organic side is interesting to see. I have nothing against major news organizations, they pay my bills.”

* * *

A Partial List of Photo-Sharing Projects

Augusta Chronicle’s Spotted

Flickr: MLK Boulevards Pool

Flickr: Global Photojournalism Pool

Flickr: Online News Association Pool [Note: Reuters posted these photos on their Jumbotron in Times Square during the 2005 ONA conference.]

Flickr: Global Poverty Pool

Buzznet: Houston Chronicle on Hurricane Rita

Buzznet: Biloxi (Miss.) Sun-Herald on Hurricane Katrina

Buzznet: Miami Herald on Hurricane Wilma

Buzznet: Charlotte (N.C.) Observer on Pets

Buzznet: Ventura County Star

Buzznet: Bakersfield Californian

Buzznet: Roanoke (Va.) Times

Scoopt, based in Glasgow, Scotland; Cell Journalist, based in Nashville, Tenn.; and Spy Media, in San Jose, Calif., all are hoping to represent this growing class of amateur photographers by letting anyone upload photos that are then peddled to media outlets.

Each service offers a different deal, but the idea is the same: Citizen photogs shouldn’t just give their work away on Flickr and to media websites; they deserve the same payment as professionals get. But these new services will have to prove that there are enough newsworthy photos to support such a service. And they’ll have the huge task of vetting and filtering material, while also trying to squeeze money out of increasingly cash-poor media companies.

Of the three startups, Scoopt was first to market, and has already placed two photos and one video in the British press. One was a shot of the aftermath of a car chase, another was video from a commuter train fire, and the third was a shot from supermodel Jodie Kidd’s wedding.

Scoopt lets anyone upload as many photos as they want for free, and then splits the proceeds from media sales 50/50 with clients — the same rate as most professional photo agencies pay. Scoopt takes a three-month exclusive right to sell what it deems newsworthy photos, though more often the site offers non-exclusive contracts so the shutterbug can post the photo on their blog or elsewhere.

Scoopt founder and managing director (the UK equivalent of CEO) Kyle MacRae told me via e-mail that this is not a business that can thrive on automation. He said Scoopt spends a lot of time coaching users via e-mail and the phone, and also has hired veteran journalist Neil Michael as sales manager.

“We also work very VERY hard to sell material,” MacRae said. “I honestly don’t believe that there are any shortcuts. Much as I’d love to stick images in a gallery and wait for media buyers to come along and pick them up, it’s simply not going to happen. Or rather, it might work for low-value stock images but that’s already a saturated market. With news, you have to be on the ball and you have to sell actively into the media.”

Cell Journalist is still building up its image library before the site starts selling photos to the media, according to founder and president Parker Polidor. Cell Journalist is free for any photographer, and the site takes 96-hour exclusive rights to the images. It will pay photographers a flat $50 fee for each sale of the image.

“We’re going after smaller local markets,” Polidor told me. “I’m in Nashville, and we have The Tennessean [newspaper] and other local affiliates who are interested in getting these images for their local audience. I would love to get images of national or international events — it would be a dream come true — but honestly, those images are few and far between. But we do want images from local events, which happen on a much more regular basis.”

Spy Media is the most recent entry into the online photo-brokering field, though it is trying to operate as more of a photo community. For now anyone can upload photos for free, though when the site officially launches on Nov. 1, there will likely be a $1 upload fee per image, according to the company. Photographers can set whatever price they want, and buyers can search and pay for images. The site will take a 35 percent cut of each sale. The startup is being run by father-son team Tom and Bryan Quinn. Bryan is the 22-year-old son of Tom, a former president of high-tech company Novell.

Bryan Quinn, whose senior thesis project at the University of the Pacific was a blueprint for the company, told me that 60 percent of photographers using the site were actually professionals who wanted to sell leftover photos from jobs — but where the photographers retained the license. Quinn said that Spy Media would offer a service for photo editors by making photos searchable by location and description.

“No editor has time to check out every personal website, and then call the photographer and negotiate a price,” Quinn said. “It takes way too long. No editor is going to be proactive. But you can go on to Spy Media, and search a radius of 50 miles from where you are. You can search your location to find photos. That takes an editor a minute.”

Is there a business there?

Despite the buzz around citizen photographers and their ability to snap photos at the right place at the right time, some old-line photographers are skeptical that these agencies will have enough newsworthy material to support their businesses.

Longtime photojournalist Dirck Halstead is a senior fellow in photojournalism at the Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin as well as editor and publisher of The Digital Journalist. He was pessimistic about the chances for these nouveau agencies to succeed.

“I think it is a very marginal business,” Halstead told me via e-mail. “The London subway bombings were an anomaly. My guess is that most of these ‘agencies’ fall into the fly-by-night category. If an amateur truly has a remarkable photograph, they can sell it through existing agency channels. There is still a qualitative difference between a professional photojournalist and a ‘citizen photographer.’ Let me put it another way: Would I as the owner of a newspaper, magazine or agency get rid of my staff or contract photographers, and run an ad saying ‘we need your photos’?”

Of course, the livelihoods of professional photojournalists have been endangered for some time, as media companies have restricted photogs’ rights to resell photos and have hired young replacements who will work for less. The move to cheaper citizen photographers by media outlets could be another threat to pros.

Award-winning photojournalist Donald Winslow, now the editor of News Photographer magazine, saw the push into citizen photos as another way media outlets will cut costs.

“Yes, it’s part of the continued ‘devaluization’ of photojournalism — where today everyone’s a photographer, and everyone’s fairly technically proficient thanks to advanced cameras that let a 5-year-old make technically sophisticated images,” Winslow told me via e-mail. “When people start looking for avenues to get a product for free that previously was part of the annual capital budget, that’s not a good future indicator for the well-being of photojournalism as a paid profession. … If people don’t want to pay for photography in the physical world, there’s no motivation for them to pay for pictures in the virtual world either.”

At this early stage, it’s hard to tell who’s exploiting whom for profit. Cell Journalist’s Polidor pitches his service as a way for amateurs to get paid for photos that they’re currently giving away for free to citizen journalism sites at MSNBC, CNN and the BBC.

“We’re trying to change the mindset, change the perception for people that there is value in these images — and they don’t have to be exploited by the media any longer,” Polidor said. “They can actually get money for these images, and it’s what they should do. They shouldn’t send those images in for free.”

That might be true for the really valuable newsworthy photos, but is Cell Journalist really paying photographers fairly at $50 per usage? Spy Media’s Bryan Quinn was upfront in telling me that he saw his service as a way for Big Media to save money on photos that are underpriced by amateurs.

“[A media outlet] can go to these [photo agencies] that have been around years and years and years, and you can pay $1,000 for the photo, or you can go to Spy Media, and find a photo that’s exactly the same for $40,” Quinn said. “Because most of the images we’ve had that were newsworthy, I looked and the guy was only selling it for $55. And I go onto another site and price out what a similar photo is worth and it’s $450. So newspapers can save a lot of money, and this is at a time when newspapers are coming under a crunch for the money they’re spending.”

Verifying photos and promoting good citizenship

Even if these startups can make citizen photo agencies into viable businesses, they still will have to deal with a grab-bag of ethical issues, from verifying that the photos are real to making sure they don’t promote paparazzi-like behavior and snooping.

Charlie Tillinghast, president of MSNBC.com, told me he thought traditional photo agencies could likely handle newsworthy photos shot by amateurs. But he said the new crop of citizen photo agencies might provide a worthy service if they could take on the expense of vetting citizen photos and filtering through the plethora of images — and find the gems.

“For us the value-add isn’t so much that they have photos taken by amateurs, because we could put a note on our website and get tons of that,” Tillinghast said. “It’s the fact that they’ve already filtered through them all, put them in the database. We expect them to vouch for their authenticity [and] provide a certain safety net for us.”

Tillinghast said MSNBC.com was already stung by publishing a photo of an early summer hurricane submitted by a citizen photog. It turned out the image was shot in a different place and by a professional photographer under contract with the site. “If you have an agency that can take the risk away, then you have something,” he said. Still, Tillinghast was doubtful the nascent services could make themselves known enough so amateur shooters would contact them with the hot photo of the moment.

As for filtering, Scoopt’s MacRae says each image is vetted by actual humans, who then grade the image internally on its newsworthiness. He believes the filtering method is scalable to large quantities of images, but only if the citizen photogs limit submissions to newsworthy photos and Scoopt has enough staff to monitor the photo flow.

All three sites have online terms of service that ask photographers to respect the privacy of subjects and not to break the law in obtaining images. But Cell Journalist’s Polidor thinks just the name of his competitor, Spy Media, sends the wrong message.

“I wonder about Spy Media, what their intent is,” Polidor said. “The idea of Spy Media is that someone gets in your face, and their slogan is ‘It pays to spy.’ I don’t want their name and slogan to taint this new emerging citizen journalism field. … We are not encouraging anybody to spy on celebrities. What it comes down to is an expectation of privacy. There is no privacy once someone comes out of the club.”

Spy Media’s Quinn said the site wouldn’t tolerate citizen photogs who break laws to get photos, and wouldn’t run pornographic images. However, graphic bloody images might be acceptable if they’re newsworthy, he said. The litmus test is whether there’s news relevance and the photo was shot in a legal fashion.

“They can’t break into Britney Spears’ backyard and take a photo of her sunbathing,” he said. “We’re going to remove the photos and your user name forever. We’re not going to allow you to sell on our site if you’re breaking the law or copyright laws. … If a celebrity is walking down the street and trips and falls, then that’s news. If it’s newsworthy, and the photo was taken legally, we’re going to allow it on our site.”

* * *

The Basics on Citizen Photo Agencies

A look at the basic details of the three startups so far.

Scoopt

http://www.scoopt.com

Location: Glasgow, Scotland

Number of registered photographers: More than 3,000

How it pays: 50/50 split for each sale of photos

Cost to photographer: Free

What rights it takes: Varies according to photo quality. If site thinks photo is newsworthy, it takes three-month exclusive license to sell; otherwise, it only takes non-exclusive contract and photo owner can post or sell elsewhere.

Cell Journalist

http://www.celljournalist.com

Location: Nashville, Tenn.

Number of registered photographers: Several hundred

How it pays: $50 flat fee for each sale

Cost to photographer: Free

What rights it takes: 96-hour exclusive license, then becomes non-exclusive so owner can sell or post.

Spy Media

http://www.spymedia.com

Location: San Jose, Calif.

Number of registered photographers: More than 1,000

How it pays: Photographer sets price; site takes 35 percent cut of each sale.

Cost to photographer: Free until Nov. 1 launch; then likely to be $1 per photo.

What rights it takes: None; photographer decides what rights each buyer of photo gets.

Source: Scoopt, Cell Journalist, Spy Media.

Like the tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia, the first reports came from people at the scene who had videocameras. [See related OJR stories by Mark Glaser and Shefali Srinivas.] In this case, the cameras were smaller and built into phones. But despite the day being a major breakthrough for citizen media — from Wikipedia’s collective entry to group blogs such as Londonist’s hour-by-hour rundown — it also brought out the worst in some bystanders.

A London blogger who identifies himself only as Justin and blogs at Pfff.co.uk, told his story of surviving the bombing on the train that exploded near Edgware Road. His harrowing account includes this scene as he finally comes out of the underground tunnel and into the fresh air: “The victims were being triaged at the station entrance by Tube staff and as I could see little more I could do so I got out of the way and left,” he wrote. “As I stepped out people with cameraphones vied to try and take pictures of the worst victims. In crisis some people are cruel.”

The next day, Justin reflected a bit more on the people outside who were trying to photograph the victims.

“These people were passers-by trying to look into the station,” Justin wrote. “They had no access, but could have done well to clear the area rather than clog it. The people on the train weren’t all trying to take pictures, we were shocked, dirty and helping each other. People were stunned, but okay. The majority of the train was okay as I walked from my carriage (the last intact one) down through the train I saw no injuries or damage to the remaining four or so carriages. Just people dirty and in shock. The other direction wasn’t so pretty, but you don’t need an account of this and what I saw, watching TV is enough.”

While citizen media efforts became another big story, quickly picked up by the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal, among many others, Justin was not so quick to exploit his story. In fact, his first impulse was not to watch any news accounts and not to give interviews to media outlets that wanted to glorify his situation.

I left a comment for him on his blog, asking him if he realized that all the people with cameraphones that day were helping to tell the story to the world. Was there a way they could tell that story in a more sensitive way?

“The news does hold a role and it’s important for people to understand, comprehend and learn,” Justin replied to me in another blog comment. “To ensure they’re safe, systems and procedures change, that the world ultimately gets better. I don’t even hold contempt really for the cameraphone people, but you must appreciate something else — were those people taking photos helping or were those people shocking the world? I’ve alluded to seeing [gruesome] things in the tunnel and carriage, but I’ve not documented them in any detail. I feel it is inappropriate and does not contribute to fact and information.”

So far, gruesome images from the attacks haven’t been widely distributed online or given a prominent place in Western media. That contrasts sharply with the response in the Spanish media after the Madrid train bombings on March 11, 2004, when bloody photos were on TV and in newspapers, according to a Reuters story.

The best and worst in all of us

In fact, online news sources were at the top of their game on July 7 and beyond. The BBC Web site experienced its most trafficked day ever on July 7 and was inundated with eyewitness accounts from readers — 20,000 e-mails, 1,000 photos and 20 videos in 24 hours, according to editor and acting head of BBC News Interactive Pete Clifton.

“It certainly did feel like a step-change [on July 7],” Clifton told me via e-mail. “We often get pictures from our readers, but never as many as this, and the quality was very high. And because people were on the scenes, they were obviously better than anything news agencies could offer. A picture of the bus, for example, was the main picture on our front page for much of the day.”

The BBC and Guardian both had reporters’ blogs that were updated as events unfolded, and group blogs such as BoingBoing and Londonist became instant aggregators of online information.

More surprising was the importance of alternative news sources such as Wikipedia and its useful entry created by volunteer hordes and the inundation of images on Flickr. Even across the pond, MSNBC.com experienced double its usual weekday traffic on July 7, with 10.2 million unique users, and set a record with 4.4 million users of streaming video that day.

Interestingly, both the BBC and MSNBC.com gave particular citizen journalists who survived a bit more room to tell their story on instant diaries set up for the occasion. The diarist on the BBC, a woman who would only identify herself as Rachel (previously just “R”), was not totally thrilled about becoming a media sensation herself.

“More journos phoned yesterday,” Rachel wrote in one post. “I must have given my mobile to the stringer who was asking questions when I was wandering outside the hospital getting fresh air after being stitched still in shock. The Mail on Sunday and Metro wanted to send a photographer round! I said no way. I said I felt it was important to get witness statements out at the time as I was there and felt relatively untraumatized so I’d rather they spoke to me than shoved their mikes and cameras in the faces of those who were shell-shocked or more injured. Having done that I really do not want any more fuss. … I was incredibly lucky but I have no desire to become a ‘Blast Survivor Girlie’ one week on.”

That naked impulse to tell a disaster story, glaring kleig lights and all, was once the province of mainstream and tabloid news organizations. But no longer. Now, for better and worse, our fellow citizens stand by, cameraphones in pockets, ready to photograph us in our direst times. Xeni Jardin, a freelance technology journalist and co-editor of BoingBoing, was aghast at the behavior of the citizen paparazzi at the scene described by Justin.

“It’s like the behavior when you see with a car wreck on the highway,” Jardin told me. “People stop and gawk. There’s a sense that this is some sort of animal behavior that’s not entirely compassionate or responsible. The difference here is that people are gawking with this intermediary device. I’m not sure if the people who did this were saying ‘I’ve got to blog this and get it to the BBC!’ But when everyone is carrying around these devices and we get used to this intuitive response of just snapping what we see that’s of interest — as surreal and grotesque as that scenario sounds, I imagine we will see a lot more of that.”

Jardin compared the behavior to the paparazzi that chased Princess Diana before her fatal car crash and noted that the ethical issues raised then are now applicable beyond just professional photographers.

“These are ethical issues that we once thought only applied to a certain class of people who had adopted the role of news as a profession,” Jardin said. “Now that more of us have the ability to capture and disseminate evidence or documentation of history as a matter of course, as a matter of our daily lives — as a casual gesture that takes very little time, no money, not a lot of skill — those ethical issues become considerations for all of us.”

Society under surveillance

Citizen paparazzi is not really a new concept, and the proliferation of cameras has continued unabated since the first point-and-shoot 35mm cameras took off right through cheap digital cameras. But while a few amateur photos might have made it into print magazines in the past, now the Internet is awash in photos and video taken by amateurs. As the term citizen journalist becomes part of mainstream thought — spurred on by Big Media outlets and startups — what role do these outlets play in spurring or reining in paparazzi behavior?

Dan Gillmor, founder of citizen media site Bayosphere, wrote in his landmark book “We the Media” about the proliferation of cameras in public spaces. “We are a society of voyeurs and exhibitionists,” he wrote. “We can argue whether this is repugnant, but when secrets become far more difficult to keep, something fundamental will have changed. Imagine Rodney King and Abu Ghraib times a million. … Everyone who works, or moves around, in a public place should consider whether they like the idea of all their movements being recorded by nosy neighbors.”

When I talked to Gillmor about the citizen paparazzi at the London bombing sites, he said he hoped that societies will eventually develop a zone of privacy for people in public places — but realistically didn’t think it would happen.

“The line between an obviously important public event like what happened last week and public voyeurism is unclear,” Gillmor said. “It’s probable that there are pictures from last week floating around that are far too gruesome for any news organization to ever go near it. … In the end, we’re going to have to develop new cultural norms, and I hope at some level that the more we wipe out the notion of privacy in a public space, the more I hope we end up with a kind of unwritten Golden Rule about privacy in public spaces and give people some space. I doubt it, but I hope people start to think about it.”

Counterbalancing that was Gillmor’s journalistic instinct, which said that news is news and is fair game for citizen journalists. “In a catastrophe, that’s news, and I’m not going to tell people not to take photos of historic events,” he said.

Jeff Jarvis, outspoken blogger at Buzzmachine and former president of Advance.net, trusts that normal folks using cameras will be more polite than paparazzi.

“The more I think about it, the more I do believe that most people will be more polite than paparazzi because they aren’t motivated to get the picture no one else has to make a buck,” Jarvis said via e-mail. “More reporters is merely more of what we have now. And believing in the value of news and reporting openness I think we need to see this as good. Are citizen journalists rude? Are professional journalists? Same question. Same answer.”

Citizen journalism efforts are slowly coming out of beta, though there’s room for more maturation in the relationship between contributors and media outlets. Andrew Locke, director of product strategy at MSNBC.com, said that his site made every effort to contact citizen journalists and pulled down contributions that didn’t sit right with the editorial team.

“Jeanne Rothermich, who leads our small CJ team, has put a great deal of emphasis on fostering dialogue and partnership with individual citizen reporters,” Locke told me. “We not only get more accurate information, but richer, more detailed accounts that we can share with the larger audience.”

The advantage of the media sites over unmediated sources such as Flickr is that they can use the wisdom of photo and editorial staff to vet contributions and filter out insensitive or invalid material. But Locke says the next step for citizen media is more than just mentoring contributors.

“Over time, we want to turn those passing relationships into lasting bonds [with citizen journalists],” Locke said. “Once you have a real, ongoing relationship, then you can start sharing information and wisdom back and forth. You can develop a code of conduct that means something and can stick. It’s not simply about us mentoring citizen journalists like cub reporters, it’s about the community itself developing norms and standards of propriety. Yes, we’ll always act as a gatekeeper, but once you’re in the gate as a citizen journalist, you should be an empowered member of the storytelling community. We still have a long way to go, but for citizen journalism to grow to its full potential we have to get there.”

An online collection, “Digital Warriors,” aims to present the culmination of the work produced by these soldiers. The project is supervised by Kim Newton, a veteran photojournalist who has edited coverage of the wars in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia for Reuters and also served as Knight Ridder’s senior photo editor for international news.

Online Journalism Review questioned Newton, who currently teaches photojournalism at the Brooks Institute of Photography, about these “Digital Warriors,” the double-edged sword of embedded journalism, and the ways that emerging technology challenges and expands the industry’s steadfast ethical standards.

Online Journalism Review: How has this war differed from previous U.S. wars in terms of access?

Kim Newton: It’s better than the Gulf War where nobody had access, but it’s still not as good as Vietnam, where there was pretty much complete access. I think for the most part, the embedding situation in Iraq has been a good thing.

However, I don’t think that embedding allows for complete story or a balanced view. I think [the media] are restricted to a certain degree to the relationships that they’ve developed to the units that they’re with. I think that even though they’re told they have complete access, if something was published they really didn’t like, the [embeds]would be moved out. Unfortunately, the danger of this war is such that having complete access is probably unrealistic.

OJR: How has the fact that so many soldiers have digital cameras changed the practice of photojournalism?

Newton: Since the Civil War when photography really became an influence in war time, soldiers have been writing stories or taking pictures of the war. The difference is now they can publish instantaneously on the Internet by sending it to their family members who post on web sites, or they post themselves. So, I can do Internet searches for photography from the Iraq war, and I’ll come up with thousands of images and hundreds of web sites that have been created by soldiers and soldiers’ families.

Granted, it’s not like being published in The New York Times or The Washington Post or your local paper or a magazine where it has a national audience. But if you do take the time to seek it out, I think there are opportunities out there to find a more personalized view of the war than we’ve ever seen before.

OJR: Describe your current project, Digital Warriors.

Newton: While I was thinking about all these soldiers having digitial cameras and trying to figure out a way to collect images and set up a web site, the Los Angeles Times came out with a story that basically discussed the Iraq war and the uncensored view of the front lines. I wanted to go beyond the Abu Ghraib prison photos and not just find sensational pictures that would cause a national uproar of some kind. I wanted to find images that were of a journalistic level and that told a personal side of this war that I felt we weren’t seeing from traditional media. The intent is to edit a large body of work from these soldiers that will produce a personal view that I don’t think we’ve seen from this war.

My expectations were high in the beginning and they’re lower now, but I haven’t given up. I will continue to plug away, and I hope that I can maybe find a connection within the military where I can get the word out and find a way to collect the images. I think maybe my original method might have failed because I just wasn’t reaching the core group that I needed. And also it may be that it’s too early, and that a lot of the images I’m thinking are out there, maybe people haven’t posted or they’re afraid to post.

OJR: How has the U.S. administration’s attempt to censor wartime images affected the flow of images from Iraq?

Newton: This is the first time in my memory where it’s been so blatant and obvious. The best example of that is the picture The Seattle Times published of coffins coming back flag-draped. The administration and the U.S. Department of Defense were furious because they had established a policy that there would be no pictures of dead soldiers coming home. But I really can’t speak to how culpable the media is in participating with the administration’s censoring.

I know that when I worked for wire services like Reuters and Knight Ridder, we pretty much published everything that came across. I remember covering a lot of the Middle East conflict, and I would get pictures every day of blown apart bodies of suicide bombers and heads of people, and I would publish those [photos] on the wire. Rarely would they ever be published in U.S. publications.

Having worked in both American publications and foreign media, I found that the foreign media, especially in Britain, and most of Europe and the Middle East, are more likely to publish what we would call sensational images in this country. But, I think they’re images that tell the truth and the reality of what’s going on in those places. I think there is a censorship among American publications when it comes to controversial images or images that are going to make people squirm a little bit, and I don’t think they get published in this country maybe as often as they should.

OJR: How do you find that an online audience responds to images produced in the current war? Is this audience more adaptable or accepting of a wider range of images?

Newton: It’s not like Life magazine, which would come out every week and you pretty much knew who your audience and demographic were. And politicians or people would react to stories in those magazines. If it was a political issue, it would get to your congressman or senator.

With the Internet, it’s much more fragmented and you have to do a lot more searching. There is a lot of room for error, and I think it’s too early to tell where it’s all going. I have a lot of hope that it’s going to be a good place for visual journalists and for photography.

OJR: How does the time you spent covering wars in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia compare with the current coverage of the war in Iraq?

Newton: In Bosnia and Kosovo, I think that for the most part the coverage was one-sided and we weren’t really seeing the other side. In many ways that’s similar to the coverage we’re getting now. Although, I think then, the photographers weren’t embedded with any group of soldiers, so they had more access to developing relationships with rebel units or what would be the enemy to the Western side of the conflict.

It’s very rare that photographers from Western news agencies will develop a relationship with a side that is fighting what we would call the friendly side. In the Iraq war, there are very few images coming out from the insurgent side. It’s all coverage of the Americans or British fighting the insurgents.

That happens pretty regularly in war time. It wasn’t until years later that you get to see both sides in the Second World War. The Germans took a lot of still pictures of the concentration camps and their side of the war, so now we can go back and look at those images and get their point of view.

OJR: How did digital photography evolve during your tenure at Reuters in terms of new ethical issues?

Newton: When I started at Reuters, they were transitioning to digitial imaging and that’s what excited me. There has always been a strong ethical foundation at the places that I’ve worked and that foundation never changed. We adapted to the new technologies, in a lot of ways at the edge of our seats. As things happened, we would create new rules, but the basic foundation of not manipulating photographs remained.

I remember one day, being on the desk when some photographer sent in a picture that he had put all these jet planes in. We all saw right away that it was manipulated image, and even in the caption it said that it was a manipulated image, but right away it became a “fireable” offence because if you even sent in a joke it wasn’t to be tolerated.

OJR: What new ethical standards are involved in teaching photojournalism at the Brooks Institute of Photography?

Newton: That’s an ongoing issue and an ongoing question. We are continually having discussions and students are raising ethical questions concerning technology, Photoshop or approaching people to be photographed. I think it’s really important for students to be aware of the problems in the industry.

Brian Walski at the L.A. Times is an obvious example that we can use to visually show how one person used the technology to manipulate a situation. I think our personal accounts also add to the ethical question and how to deal with issues students encounter as a photojournalist on a daily basis, and it’s at the forefront of our education here.

OJR: In an age where anyone with a computer program can crop or transpose photos easily, how have ethics adapted in photojournalism?

Newton: I think that for the most part, most large news organizations understand the issue, but not all of them have policies, which sort of amazes me. I think every organization has to sit down with their staff and draw out how to deal with ethical issues before they come up.

I think the technology in Photoshop is pretty amazing and things can be done that can’t be noticed by the average eye. Yet, new technologies are coming online that can tell if images have been manipulated, and I think that’s one area that editors will probably utilize in the future.

OJR: Who or what have been your greatest influences?

Newton: One of my greatest influences is a photographer named Dan Budnik, who was a photographer for Life Magazine and Time/Life. He photographed the Civil Rights movement and he also photographed a lot of the abstract expressionist artists during the 50s and 60s in New York. I was an assistant to him for a lot of the 70s.

W. Eugene Smith was one of the photojournalists who had a great influence on me in terms of photographing something that would lead to a positive change in society. His essay on Minamata in Japan was a major influence when I moved to Japan in the early 1980s.

OJR: Any advice you’d like to share with aspiring photojournalists?

Newton: I think you’ve got to have a real passion for what you’re doing and a real stick-with-it ness and a real ability to communicate visually. It’s harder now than it’s ever been because the publications just aren’t there, so you really have to have a lot of passion to follow through and do this job. But I think there is still a much needed place for photojournalism in the world and in our society.

OJR: What about citizen or amateur journalists using digital cameras? Any ground rules they can follow to adhere to journalistic standards?

Newton: If they’re trying to get their images published in the mainstream media or anywhere, I think they have to stick to the same ethical standards that we’ve all abided by, which is to give an honest representation of what they’re looking at and not manipulating the scene beyond its natural viewpoint. By that I mean adding or removing elements of an image to change the content and its point of view.

OJR: Do you have any other final thoughts or comments?

Newton: Technology has allowed us to view things that we might not have been able to see in the past. The average soldier has access to this instantaneous technology, even though the quality may not be up to that of a professional photojournalist. And I think that’s a unique point of view that we’ve never had before, not just in war, but in society.

Where it’s going to end up is sort of anybody’s guess right now, but it fascinates me that it’s out there, and I’ll continue to be fascinated by it and try to do research on it or just be a part of viewing it like everybody else.