Have Camera Phone? Yahoo and Reuters Want You to Work for Their News Service
Hoping to turn the millions of people with digital cameras and camera phones into photojournalists, Yahoo and Reuters are introducing a new effort to showcase photographs and video of news events submitted by the public.
Context & Ripple Effects
The announcement lands at a low point for Yahoo: the company reported weak second-quarter search-advertising revenue in July 2006 and remains overshadowed by Google, so content it does not have to pay staff to produce has obvious appeal. It also extends an existing arc — Reuters opened its video to mass distribution back in December 2005 via mass-distribution of Reuters video, and this move adds public submissions on top of the agency's own feed.
For Yahoo, the timing fits a broader 2006 push across distribution surfaces: a November partnership with 176 newspapers led by MediaNews, and a July deal putting Yahoo services on tens of millions of Motorola camera phones — the very devices this new submission pipeline depends on.
First-order effects
- Reuters gains a volunteer eyewitness layer feeding photos and video into its news service at near-zero acquisition cost, sitting alongside its staff wire output.
- Yahoo gets differentiated news content for its portal at a moment when its paid-search business is trailing Google's.
Second-order effects
- Wire rivals such as AP face pressure to match the free-contributor sourcing model or defend their rates against imagery that costs nothing to obtain.
- Editors inherit a verification and rights-clearance workload they did not have with staff photographers, shifting cost from capture to vetting.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, news photography structurally shifts from salaried professionals toward a curated crowd, making authentication and provenance of submitted media a permanent editorial function rather than an occasional problem.
The trend: News imagery is shifting from staffed photojournalism toward agency-curated public submissions, with cameras already in millions of pockets.