Citizen Paine | Citizen Journalism

Peoria blogger aims to shame

An anoymous blog has its sights set on those people who bring shame to Peoria, Illinois. The Shame on Peoria site launched over the weekend and appears to be affiliated with a second site, Peoria Crack House.

Describing its purpose, Shame on Peoria says:

Peoria and Pekin Illinois recently determined to go after property owners with blighted property, in "shaming" campaigns. Turnabout being fair play some citizens felt the Politicians and Bureaucrats also needed some shaming for their blight on the body politic.

And on Peoria Crack House:

Dedicated to the Buyers and Sellers of Crack Cocaine, who we hope to remove from our community.

As with the Dog Poop Girl incident, here's another example of the public using the internet as a tool for exposing perceived wrongs. Whether this exposure corrects bad behavior, I'm not sure. If it does, it probably will occur indirectly. Someone running a crack house may not shut down just because a blog has mentioned it. But the blog could spur police to act.

Link props: Peoria Pundit and PollyPeoria

When you capture breaking news, who ya gonna call?

Paul Grabowicz and Steve Outing, both posting on Poynter Online's E-Media Tidbits last week, note that it's not just the news media asking citizens to send in their eyewitness images: Law enforcement is doing the same.

Of course, it's nothing new for the police to ask citizens to provide information. What's different in the two examples cited here is that law enforcement is setting up web sites specifically for this purpose.

After the second London bombings, British police solicited citizen photos and videos, and in Malaysia, the government wants people who witness traffic offenders to post to a Hall of Shame web site.

Outing writes:

In this blog we focus on media, where grassroots-media/citizen-journalism activity is high right now. It's interesting to see how the concept can apply to other sectors of society.

Responding to Outing's post, Brendan Watson questions whether that term should be applied to what the police are seeking:

Citizen snitching, perhaps. Community watch, perhaps. But journalism? We usually call people who do this type of work either police (or in the case of citizens assisting in police work informants). Aren't you concerned that we're throwing this term around way too much to the point that it will soon be absolutely meaningless? Perhaps better term to sum up this current digital movement is personal media. ...

Another debate over terminology. In each case, citizens are being asked to report what they observe. The difference, as Watson says in the rest of his comment:

But journalism seems to envoke an intent to communicate with a mass audience, a committment to public service, and hopefully to some basic journalistic values that aren't present in much of what is currently being called citizen journalism.

What the citizen eyewitness does with the image will be much more interesting than what we call it. It won't matter much for events with multiple witnesses with cameras; some will submit to police, others to citizen journalism web sites. But what happens when one person has the key photo or video? Does he or she post to a personal blog, submit it to large media web site, go through a middleman like Scoopt, or send it to the police? My guess is that we'll see all of the above, though if citizens come to expect payment for high-demand images -- and why wouldn't they? -- the police may wind up near the bottom of the list.

Surveillance vs. citizen cameras: checks and balances

Writing about the proliferation of camera phones and security cameras, Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby, in Looking Back at Big Brother, says the technology may not be making us much safer but it is creating new forms of checks and balances:

In the future, when a government accuses someone of wrongdoing on the basis of footage from surveillance cameras, that government better get it right. Chances are the same incident will have been captured by private citizens on camera phones, whose manufacturers expect to sell 186 million units this year.

The proliferation of electronic eyes is probably inevitable, but that's no reason to despair. Governments will watch citizens, but citizens will watch back. More likely than not, the balance of power will shift in favor of the citizens, the inverse of Orwell's prophecy.

Link props: The Open Society Paradox

Use of G8 protest pics stirs fair-use debate

J.D. Lasica points out a heated debate over whether a new KRON-TV blog overstepped the rules on fair use with its publication of photos of G8 protests in San Francisco, images that originated on Indymedia sites.

SF Indymedia and Indybay published the photos in several posts, including here and here. KRON's Brian Shields, doing real-time blogging during the anarchists' protests, posted some of those images on KRON's The Bay Area is Talking blog. Indymedia folks complained that the use of the photos on KRON's site violated copyright law.

Shields, in the post's comments section, defended his use of the photos under "the fair use exception to the copyright laws for breaking news coverage."

Terry Heaton, a blogger and consultant who helped launch the site, didn't address the legal issues but suggested that Shields and KRON were helping the Indymedia citizen journalists reach a mainstream audience with their message. "If, in fact, you are giving voice to those who wouldn't normally have a voice, why would you wish to limit that voice to a closed network?" he wrote in a comment on the KRON blog.

Lasica said he believes Shields' legal argument is "well-founded," and he chastised the Indymedia folks, saying, "But why in the world would Indy Media want to restrict the widespread online distribution of such a newsworthy set of photos? What rank hypocrisy."

Meanwhile, comments from posters indentified as "janky" and "k" took KRON to task for using the images without permission. Janky said:

I would ask that you take them all down and link to the individual articles where they were published. The copyright law for the SF Bay Area Indymedia site clearly states the obvious use limitations of content that is published on the site.

All the photos on this site were taken by people within the community and were posted on indybay.org for a reason. If you do not respect that, then at least leave comments for each individual to contact you for permission for use.

You cant just take photos willy nilly and repost them on a site that is for-profit without expressed permission. Either that, or I get to start making HD copies of Kron4 broadcasts and posting them everywhere on the net due to "fair use" laws.

You folks have paid reporters who make a living from this.

UPDATE: Discussion about fair use has continued in a separate thread on The Bay Area is Talking. Read the comment posted Sunday by Jackson West of sfist.com. He has the most thoughtful, well-reasoned approach so far of all the comments I've read in this thread and the one that started the debate.

More reaction to the London CJ angle

The citizen journalism angle continues to get significant coverage in the wake of the London bombings.

Washington Post: Witnesses to History

The London attacks moved the trend to a new level. Web sites from the BBC's to the Guardian's provided eyewitness accounts, some showing up as little as an hour or two after the first bomb went off. ... The tsunami prompted bloggers to post thousands of video entries and journal-style stories that circulated the Internet in a huge swarm of unedited data. London, (Dan Gillmor) said, showed how that data could be edited like traditional news and fill the gaps that the news could not.

Poynter Online: E-Media Tidbits: Mass Audience for London News by the Masses

One of the first eyewitness pictures was sent by Adam Stacey via his camera phone to Alfie Dennen, the owner of Alfie's Discotastic Moblog and was from there quickly picked up by TV channel Sky, which credited it as "a passenger's camera photo." It was also picked up by the BBC, which added the careful caveat, "This photo by Adam Stacey is available on the Internet and claims to show people trapped on the underground system."

LA Times: Cellphones Change the View of Disaster

Shortly after bombs ripped through London's transportation system Thursday morning, U.S. and British television networks began airing the first footage of the aftermath — dim images of shaken commuters streaming through a smoky underground tunnel. ... "It's a harbinger of what's to come in terms of citizen journalism," said Jon Klein, president of CNN/U.S. "These days, you just have to be in the wrong place at the right time, and you too can cover the news." ... But the increasing availability of the footage will also raise the need for stringent standards about what gets on the air, news executives noted. In London, video technicians studied the footage to ensure it was authentic, according to Justine Bower, a spokeswoman for Sky News.

New York Times: Witnesses Post Instant Photos on the Web

Online photo-sharing sites and Web blogs began chronicling the attacks soon after they occurred, posting material often gathered before professional news organizations arrived on the scenes. ... Tim Bradshaw, who posted photos from around London on flickr.com, said in an e-mail message he was not sure at first whether he would post them. "It seemed kind of wrong," Mr. Bradshaw wrote. "The BBC and other news Web sites were so overwhelmed it was almost like an alternative source of news. "I think it's really interesting how many camera-phone pictures made it onto the national news."

'Dog Poop Girl' story hits the fan

The "Dog Poop Girl" story, the talk of blogs for several weeks as an example of how citizen journalists and the internet are changing the rules on privacy, hit the Washington Post on Thursday with a piece titled "Subway Fracas Escalates Into Test Of the Internet's Power to Shame."

This article -- about the girl on the South Korea subway whose photo was plastered online after she refused to clean up after her pooch -- says:

In discussions with dozens of people about this story, and in reading comments on blogs, I found an intriguing common thread. The instinct of most was to accept using the Internet as a new social-enforcement tool, but to search for that point on the continuum where enough was too much.

Putting Dog Poop Girl's picture on the Web was OK, some said, but not the clamoring for more information that followed. Others said the woman's face and other identifying features should have been obscured more. Still others said she was entitled to no privacy at all.

Columbia Journalism Review also joined in with "The Tale of Dog Poop Girl Is Not So Funny After All."

Where do you start? Where do you end?

Today, as events unfold in London, I'm drawn to the eyewitness accounts, such as these comments on the BBC and Guardian web sites and this BBC collection of reader-submitted photos. Yet, in this age of self-publishing, that's a miniscule fraction of what's being published. Thousands of citizen journalist posts and images are showing up on Technorati, Flickr and other aggregators. Finding the best is a challenge.

For blogs, I've been looking at "london"-tagged posts at Technorati and at the UKBlogs Aggregator. For images, try "london"-tagged posts at Flickr. Flickr also has two-relevant photo pools: The London Bomb Blasts Pool and London Explosions Pool.

Something innate compels me to wade through dozens of posts and photos, yet there's just too much here. Neither Technorati nor Flickr call for the user to evaluate content, so we can't help guide one another to the best material.

Over at moblog UK, users to rate photos. But on a breaking story, that's not much help because the highest-rated photos are older ones. There's no mechanism for promoting the best of the most-recent images.

So, we rely on the individual human filters:
Boing Boing, which led me to the Flickr pools.
Project Nothing!
Wikipedia
Tim Worstall
Europhobia
Buzz Machine

Scoopt: Our target is the guy with the cameraphone

Scoopt's Kyle MacRae responds via email to my post this week about the new service, which offers to sell your photos or videos to a publisher for a 50-50 split and a six-month exclusive license.

Here are Kyle's comments:

With reference to the initial Scoopt six-month exclusive license, you said:

That's quite a commitment to make to a new player, and I'm not sure many citizen journalists will go for it. I suppose if you're a prolific photographer, you might take a chance on Scoopt. If they do good by you, then that six-month term might not seem so stiff.

I think it's important that we draw a clear distinction here between professional photographers, aspiring professional photographers -- and somebody with a cameraphone who just happens to be in the right place at the right time and snaps a newsworthy event. Scoopt was set up specifically and exclusively to represent this last group.

My contention is that the true amateur doesn't know or care about photographic licensing -- and, further, nor should they care. Scoopt is not for people making a living or seeking to make a living from photography; Scoopt is for somebody who realises that one day he just might take a great picture and could get some money for it. The true amateur with a cameraphone doesn't want to phone a picture desk editor and haggle or auction a photo.

Indeed, the true amateur probably doesn't know what a picture desk editor is, or how to approach one. But he does know that newspapers and magazines buy pictures if the picture is strong enough. Scoopt helps him make that sale.

Scoopt also protects the rights of our members. What happens when an amateur with a hot photo phones up a newspaper? Chances are he'll (unwittingly) sign away universal rights in exchange for the price of a hot dinner. The paper will then sub-license the photo around the world and the photographer will receive not a further penny. But with Scoopt, the photographer always retains copyright. We will license the photo for publication on his behalf, potentially time and time again -- and the photographer will ALWAYS get 50% of the fee.

We need an exclusive license for the reasons given, and which you quoted.

Basically, we must be able to guarantee to a publisher that we can deliver what we promise -- for instance, a one-day-only exclusive right to publish a photo on the front page. The easiest approach for us would undoubtedly be to demand assignation of copyright from our members. In other words, when a member submits a photo, we would automatically own that photo and could do whatever we want with it. (This is what our lawyers advised!) However, we simply feel that this is unfair on the photographer. It is, we believe, right and proper that even a complete amateur with no interest in or knowledge of copyright and licensing should retain copyright to his own works, always. The six-month exclusive license is a compromise that gives us the security we need to trade on his behalf without stripping the photographer of his rights.

In summary, if Scoopt was a traditional photo agency pitching to traditional pro or pro-am photographers trying to make a living from photography, I'd agree with you and we'd offer a range of (complicated) licensing agreements.

But Scoopt is different. We represent the true amateur who gets a scoop snap of a newsworthy event and wants a) the best possible price and b) an easy life.

Scoopt aims to be middleman for UK citizen photos and videos

Scoopt is a new service that tries to connect UK citizen photojournalists with publishers. You take a picture or video, send it to Scoopt and they sell it. In exchange, Scoopt gets 50 percent of what the publisher pays. That part of the deal may seem reasonable to many amateurs, but Scoopt's six-month exclusive license may not.

During that time, you can't do anything with the photo. "In short, you agree not to publish the photo in any way, shape or form, either directly or indirectly, for six months," Scoopt says.

Here's how Scoopt explains its needs for that exclusivity:

To understand this, imagine that all we had was a non-exclusive license. Let's say you take a 'hot' photo and send it to Scoopt. We do our thing and license the Daily Planet to publish the photo on the front cover of tomorrow's edition.

Naturally enough, the Daily Planet wants to keep this scoop all to itself. Indeed, that's precisely what it's paying for. But unless we have an exclusive license, we simply can't guarantee this. If you or somebody acting on your behalf were to go to the Daily Bugle and sells the same photo (or a similar photo, if you took several of the same event), or even if you were to upload it to a photo-sharing site, the Daily Planet would lose its scoop.

We need an exclusive license for six months in order to guarantee that a scoop stays a scoop. This is where the money is to be made. Your money!

That's quite a commitment to make to a new player, and I'm not sure many citizen journalists will go for it. I suppose if you're a prolific photographer, you might take a chance on Scoopt. If they do good by you, then that six-month term might not seem so stiff.

Current TV recently drew some criticism for a three-month exclusivity policy, though it has responded by saying that it may come up with other options.

Scoopt also might want to consider giving contributors some alternatives. Perhaps the percentage split could vary depending on what sort of licensing rights the photographer is willing to give up.

Linkprops to Phototalk.

UPDATE: Scoopt's Kyle MacRae responds.