Yahoo and Reuters Want You to be a Photojournalist

Hoping to turn the millions of people with digital cameras and camera phones into photojournalists, Yahoo Inc. and Reuters are introducing a new effort to showcase photographs and video of news events submitted by the public, reports a New York Times article.

Photos and videos submitted will be placed throughout Reuters.com and Yahoo News. Reuters said that it would also start to distribute some of the submissions next year to the thousands of print, online and broadcast media outlets that subscribe to its news service, and it hoped to develop a service devoted entirely to user-submitted photographs and video.

Many news organizations turned to photographs taken by amateurs to supplement coverage of events like the London subway bombing and the Asian tsunami. Yahoo's news division has already used images originally posted on Flickr, the company's photo-sharing site, says the article.

Users can upload photos and videos to a section of Yahoo called You Witness News. All of the submissions will appear on Flickr or a similar site for video. Editors at both Reuters and Yahoo will review the submissions and select some to place on pages with relevant news articles, just as professional photographs and video clips are woven into their news sites.

Users will not be paid for images displayed on the Yahoo and Reuters sites, says The New York Times. But people whose photos or videos are selected for distribution to Reuters clients will receive a payment. Ahearn said the company had not yet figured out how to structure those payments. The basic payment may be relatively small, but he said Reuters was likely to pay more to people offering exclusive rights to images of major events.