Reuters: Were You There When The News Happened?

My Top 3

I’m still not convinced at the effectiveness of this service. Almost a year ago, Reuters in collaboration with Yahoo announced the Youwitness News platform. If you see a newsworthy event, you are asked to send the picture to YouWitness, either by emailing it to pics@reuters.com or visiting the YouWitness site. Reuters editors review the pictures and select the most newsworthy images for publication on Reuters.com. Your compensation is that your picture is distributed within the reuters platform.

Even after a year, there doesn’t seem to be any change with their policy. If Reuters aim to target citizen journalism, it is important to provide users with proper incentives. From what I understand, you only get viewership for submitting a photo to them. But what about text? What about descriptions of the event? The platform does not support the full array of information which could be provided by the people who were actually where the news happened, and witnessed it firsthand. For this attempt to somewhat promote citizen journalism I give them fingers down. Solely because its popular, because it the current buzz, because “Media companies are racing to find ways of distributing user-generated content, as the popularity of web-produced amateur videos and photos shows no signs of waning” as stated by the FT technology blog. But not because they really care about getting a multitude of submissions nor a wide range of perspectives.

If they did care about the latter, Reuters and Yahoo would first of all offer sub-finance photographs and articles coming from amateurs. They would also create a less flashy/picture perfect site, but actually support a grassroots community of people who want to make a difference with the information that they have. Since it is easy to find so many other platforms which will help broadcast messages, why would anyone want to use the you witness news platform?

Just as reality TV allowed networking executives to launch a new series without paying its stars, this new project by Reuters and Yahoo, YouWitnessNews, will allow the companies to avoid paying their reporters. Apparently the idea is that just seeing your photo on the news page is payment enough. Imagine if Reuter’s shareholders were told, Look, we’re not making any money, but look how many people have seen our work. Something tells me they wouldn’t be nearly as happy as they are hearing that they’ve just recruited a platoon of unpaid workers to help make them money.

(source: The Free Josh Wolf Wiki)

From the website, here are the terms of use and waiver of all royalties for submitted materials:

By submitting material (including a picture, a video, other images, audio and/or text) to Reuters, you are agreeing to be bound by the Terms of Use for Submitted Materials which give Reuters a royalty-free, non-exclusive license to publish and use any material you submit and to a use of your personal data in accordance with Reuters Privacy / Data Protection Policy. You must own the copyright in the material you submit. Reuters is under no obligation to publish any material submitted. Material and any your personal data submitted to Reuters may be posted on and shared with any third party site that Reuters uses to receive your submission or to host and display such material. PLEASE NOTE THAT YOU SHOULD NOT SUBMIT ANY MATERIAL IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO REUTERS’ TERMS OF USE FOR SUBMITTED MATERIALS.