Here’s an example of citizen journalism at work: Doc Searls pulls out his camera to photograph an event and turns the results loose on the world. In Citizens 4 Journalism, he presents the photos he took, and explains:
Yesterday I attended a rally supporting current and former employees of the Santa Barbara News-Press, who will be holding a vote tomorrow for union representation. I took a pile of pictures. It was fun to perform, in a (literally) free lance way, the newspaper photography job that was one of the first I had out of college.
Here’s the photoset. And here too is permission for anybody — with any news organization, from blogs to newspapers to the News-Press itself — to use any way they want.
Here they are: use them. Cool.
Not everyone with a camera and an internet connection is going to do that, of course. The majority of photos that pop up on Flickr following major news events are copyrighted images (as opposed to CC licenced). But there are enough folk out there who will willingly cover an event and make available their output to whoever is interested. At the very least, it expands the definition of what a journalist is.
TAGS: CITIZEN JOURNALISM, PHOTOJOURNALISM
