Now, We Wait

from the if-you-build-it-hopefully-they-will-come dept

Thu, Aug 11th 2005 12:48pm — Carlo Longino

A company that recently launched to sell average people's cameraphone photos to news outlets has signed up 1,200 potential paparazzi in a month -- but hasn't gotten any photos worth selling. This highlights one potential folly of citizen journalism efforts: they rely on (often untrained) citizen journalists. That's not to say that journalism is a high art to be practiced only the trained and experienced few, but any company looking to make money from everyday peoples' journalistic longings might want to invest in some training, too.

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4 Comments

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jdw242, 11 Aug 2005 @ 1:39pm

oh god; c'mon!
camera phone pictures? WTF?
Would you buy a camera phone pic?
I wouldn't; my camera phone pics suck compared to my DSC-M1.

What did they (realistically) expect to happen?
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Aug 2005 @ 2:52pm

Re: oh god; c'mon!
well, sometimes even a cameraphone pic is better then nothin at all so they do have a potential money maker here. But lets face it, only in extreme situations like the problems in london last month when it wasnt even physically possible to get a trained camera man to the scenes. Most news items nowadays can easily have journos at the scene within mins so public pics are useless
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sighs, 11 Aug 2005 @ 2:58pm

Re: oh god; c'mon!
I don't know where you live, but in the UK, when London got bombed at the beginning of July, all we saw for days on the news and in the papers were fuzzy cameraphone videos and equally low res snaps from smoke filled tube (sorry subway) tunnels and newly open top buses. You may scoff at the idea but half our police force is wading through gigabytes of this junk trying to find something useful to help fight the war on terror!
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dorpus, 11 Aug 2005 @ 3:26pm

Really Ugly People
News crews pick photo-genic people on the street for their articles. I remember that immediately after 9/11, there was a picture of an ugly Southeast Asian woman using her cell phone on the sidewalk near the WTC, but later editions sliced out that part of the picture. I've seen the same thing happen at other natural disaster coverage, where they edited out footage of people that looked too ugly.

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