04 December 2006

Yahoo!-Reuters want photos from your mobile

Following last week's news that Yahoo! and Nokia have teamed up to provide mobile users with greater web services, the world's second most popular search engine has just announced a deal with Reuters which will allow it to showcase photographs and videos of news events taken on mobile phones as they are submitted by the public.

Yahoo!-Reuters want photos from your mobile

From December 5th onwards, users may begin uploading their photos and videos, taken on their cell phone, onto Yahoo!'s You Witness News site. All the submitted content will be placed on Yahoo!'s Flickr service - or a similar site for videos - before being reviewed by editors at both Yahoo! and Reuters. Submissions will then be selected for placement on pages with relevant news articles, in the same way that photos from professional photographers are incorporated into the site. Reuters also state that it would like to distribute some of the submissions to the thousands of print, online and broadcast media companies that subscribe to its news service beginning next year.

"There is an ongoing demand for interesting and iconic images," commented Chris Ahearn, president of Reuters media group to The New York Times. Agencies like Reuters rely on stringers, or part-time individual contributors, to make up a significant part of their news coverage. "This is looking out and saying, 'What if everybody in the world were my stringers?'" Ahearn added.

This project between Yahoo! and Reuters is perhaps one of the most high-profile attempts to encourage what is becoming known as "citizen journalism", as the number of blogs and local news sites expands rapidly across the internet. In the last few years, photos and videos uploaded onto the internet by ordinary members of the public have been vital in the proliferation of news across the globe, with amateur video footage and pictures taken on mobile phones screening dramatic events - such as the Asian tsunami in 2004, the London bombings last year and the military coup in Thailand earlier this year.

In the future, it seems that Yahoo! plans to expand its You Witness News coverage to include actual articles written by users - although, at present, officials claim that they do not have adequate resources to be able to review user-generated news coverage. In fact, Yahoo! is continuing to stretch its wingspan across the news media, as its ad deal with US newspapers in November indicates.

Users who upload onto Yahoo!'s You Witness News, however, will not be paid if their photos are used by Yahoo! News or Reuters, and many industry commentators claim that YouTube still remains a more attractive option for people with interesting video footage to post for public viewing.

Nevertheless, the step represents an excellent weapon in Yahoo!'s ever-expanding arsenal to fight for a greater share of the search engine market. And as the strength and capacity of the mobile web continues to increase, users may soon be able to upload their photos or videos directly from their mobile phone onto the You Witness News site, promising exciting new frontiers in the speed and propagation of global news coverage.