Cameraphones make public photo-journalists

NEW YORK - Armed with cameraphones and digital cameras, survivors and onlookers of last July's London bombing flooded the internet with the first haunting glimpses of the aftermath long before professional photo-journalists descended on the scene.

Now, a small handful of new internet businesses aim to get citizen shutterbugs paid for their wares, much of which were eventually splashed across newspaper and Web front pages worldwide.

"There were no avenues into the mainstream media for amateurs as members of the public," said Kyle MacRae, who founded Scotland-based Scoopt weeks after the bombing. "It's simply wrong. It's unjust."

Scoopt, a Web-based service that markets user-contributed photos to media organisations on its site (www.scoopt.com), was launched in August with little fanfare to fill the void.

Less than two months later, MacRae is now joined by two new companies in the United States aiming to profit from the natural inclination of regular citizens to document their surroundings.

Like Scoopt, Spy Media (www.spymedia.com), co-founded by Tom Quinn, a former president of software company Novell Inc.; and Cell Journalist (www.celljournalist.com) see an opportunity from the proliferation of cameraphones and the desire of readers and viewers to play a role in news gathering.

Cameraphone sales more than doubled in 2004 to 159 million, according to technology research firm Gartner. By 2008, most cellphones will be made with embedded cameras, Gartner said.

"When news happens, by the time a photographer gets there, it's over," Bryan Quinn, co-founder of Spy Media, which sees itself as an automated marketplace for spot news pictures, video and even text someday.

Spy Media was born as Quinn's college senior thesis project eight months ago. It was launched in October, with US$1 million ($1.45 million) in funding from his father and business partner, Tom Quinn.

"With ... digital cameras and their cellphones, you have the ability to get better news coverage than you've ever seen before," the younger Quinn said.

The sudden launch of new businesses courting amateur photographers coincides with an explosion in citizen journalism, where anyone with an observation and the wherewithal to post it on the Web can be an amateur reporter.

"We don't own the news any more," Richard Sambrook, director of the BBC World Service and Global News division, said at a recent internet conference in New York.

Erosion of the public trust in mainstream media coverage, marred by headline-grabbing scandals at The New York Times and CBS News, has also fuelled public interest.

But as enticing as it is for traditional media companies to harness eyewitness accounts of its audience around the world, it also raises academic questions about the contradictions between the commercial media's needs and the charitable human instinct to inform.

"I wonder whether there's a conflict between the inherently open and immediate world of citizens' media and the closed, exclusive-addicted world of big media," said Jeff Jarvis, a media critic and former journalist who writes the BuzzMachine blog, in an email exchange.

Mobile blogging company founder Chris Hoar agreed. "I think that centralising them will be difficult. By nature, these pictures and videos are taken by people who couldn't care about financial incentive or award."

Hoaxes are another more immediate concern. Scoopt and Cell Journalist employ people to authenticate photo contributions before they go up for sale, while Spy Media does not.

Spy Media founders said contributors are charged a nominal fee of US$1 to US $3 per photo in order to weed out blatantly inappropriate photos, as well as attract submissions from professional freelance photographers. Its system is automated, allowing media organisations to contact contributors directly to broker deals.

All of the services require a detailed registration process that include valid contact information.

"We will not contact a (news organisation's) pictures desk unless we're absolutely confident in the source material," MacRae said. "If we start passing on shoddy goods, then it's end of business."

Meanwhile, user contributions to the news gathering process is gathering steam.

Cameraphone and digital camera photos documenting the aftermath of hurricane Katrina that devastated the US Gulf Coast and the Indian Ocean tsunami are already cropping up on mainstream newspapers, television and Web sties enhanced news organisations' coverage this year.

"This is a fundamental realignment of the relationship between large media companies and the public," Sambrook added.

- REUTERS