Flickr, Buzznet expand citizens' role in visual journalism

November 15, 2005 by

Imagine if you were a photo editor at a major publication, and you could view and search through every digital photo on every computer in the world to put together a feature. Or if something spectacular happened, and you could search photo tags to see what everyone at the scene was seeing.

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

Filed Under: Business Tagged With: , , ,

Online agencies promise to help citizen photographers get paid

October 11, 2005 by

If the explosion in digital cameras and cameraphones makes everyone a potential on-the-spot news photographer, doesn’t it follow that this army of “citizen photographers” would need an agency to help them get paid for their photos? That’s the thinking of a trio of startups that have been birthed in the wake of the July 7 London bombings, where cameraphones and videophones captured the first indelible media images.

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.

Filed Under: Business Tagged With: ,

Did London bombings turn citizen journalists into citizen paparazzi?

July 12, 2005 by

July 7, 2005, was one of the darkest days for London, as terrorists blew up three underground trains and a double-decker bus, killing scores and injuring hundreds. But out of that darkness came an unusual light, the flickering light from survivors such as Adam Stacey and Ellis Leeper as they shot the scene underground using cameraphones and videophones.

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.”

Filed Under: Reporting Tagged With: , , ,
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