Turn Your Camera Phone Into A Profession
(AP Photo/Gerry Broome)
Starting tomorrow, the photos and videos submitted will be placed throughout Reuters.com and Yahoo News, the most popular news Web site in the United States, according to comScore MediaMetrix. Reuters said that it would also start to distribute some of the submissions next year to the thousands of print, online and broadcast media outlets that subscribe to its news service. Reuters said it hoped to develop a service devoted entirely to user-submitted photographs and video.Those who submit material used on the Web will not be paid but those whose work is distributed to Reuters clients will receive a fee. While user-generated content is hardly something brand new, this effort is one of the largest yet launched. It's sure to get plenty of attention, with this aspect getting the most attention:
Before photographs or videos are used on the Yahoo site or distributed by Reuters, photo editors at Reuters will try to vet them to weed out fraudulent or retouched images.Huffington Post's Melissa Lafsky sees this all as good news:This is an imperfect process. Last summer, a blogger discovered that photos of the conflict in Lebanon by a freelance photographer working for Reuters had been digitally altered. Reuters stopped using the photographer and withdrew his work from its archive. The company is now trying to develop software that will help detect altered photographs.
With Reuters' introduction of procedures to put viewer submissions through the same broadcast standards checks as professional materials (and hopefully even beefing those up as well), other networks may soon decide that "amateur" and "unreliable" don't have to be considered one and the same.Maybe so but Photoshop can produce some pretty amazing "pictures," it will be interesting to see what happens if (or when) a bogus photo gets through.