Comments on: Camera Phones and Citizen Journalists

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Mon, 01 Oct 2007 10:19:56 +0000

[...] Camera Phones and Citizen Journalists [...]

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 00:05:00 +0000

I think you are wrong. The recent terrorist bombing (failed, thankfully) plot in the UK is a good example. A lot of the on the scene images were from camera phones, not news organizations.

Whether or not these activities rise to the level of an organized activity that is proactive, we’re clearly not there yet. Having said that, every major news organization now has an initiative whereby individuals can send in there images and videos. Journalism is something we do, it’s not what we are.

By: James Cox

James Cox — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 22:33:50 +0000

Jeff -

sure there are a bunch of camera phones. But citizen journalism? I’m not sure. Do they make an effort to get it on local tv, to blog, etc? No. People who are out to do that are those carrying their Digital SLRs everywhere (etc).

These guys are just capturing the moment… to share with family and friends. Nothing wrong with that – but not quite the idea of citizen journalism we’re all keen to see.

By: Joe Bransom

Joe Bransom — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 19:05:18 +0000

Our company http://www.citizenimage.com was founded two years ago based on the ubiquity of digital cameras and camera phones in the hands of the every man finding themselves at the scene of an event such as the steam pipe explosion in NYC yesterday.

Citizen Image acts as a wire service/agency that represents the images taken by the “every man” to professional news outlets around the globe.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 16:40:14 +0000

Paul,
I had not thought of your number 2 and 3 but I do think you are right. The bigge is #1 which I would translate into a basic human desire to capture a moment of time, providing the tool to do so is always on and has no variable cost associated with it.

By: Paul Sweeney

Paul Sweeney — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 07:24:54 +0000

Jeff, I bet a good friend of mine that camera phones would never take off. I could not see why you would want to do this. I think three things changed. (1)It created an exponentially greater amount of opportunities where a photograph might become possible/desirable due to the very presence of the capability; (2) a distribution mechanism became possible with blog, flickr, and related services, so there was an incentive to continue taking and sharing the pictures; and (3) the price of sharing was reduced to zero through this distribution mechanism.