November 25, 2005, 10.02am • 3 comments » • 1,155 Views

Flickr photos feed news pages

Ohhhhkay, so it seems worth rounding up some of the topics busy-ness has put paid to mentioning this week…

• Flickr, Buzznet enhance citizens’ role in journalism - OJR’s Mark Glazer notes that news publishers including the New York Times, Boston Globe and Augusta Chronicle are using the photo sharing communities to source pics for news stories. I have done this more that once recently. I sourced a Flickr picture, taken Laughing Squid’s excellent SF dude Scott Beale, for a Wired News story published last week and, when I took my own photos for a recent story, I also placed the unused pictures on Flickr. Daniel Terdiman did the same when he covered the OS X Tiger launch buzz in SF. So it’s not just the case that an army of amateur photographers is filtering up into the news media (Flickratis are often very accomplished picture-makers).
• I’m interested in how the New York Times is using Flickr to document pics of Martin Luther King Boulevards around the US. “With Flickr, I can say here’s an interesting subject, and throw it open to others,” said columnist Rob Walker. “I think there’s an advantage to having it open-ended, because I could have an unlimited number of people contributing to this in an unlimited number of places over an unlimited amount of time.”
• I remember well how OnlineAthens head honcho David Bill uploaded pictures of a party-going Mike Mills to the Augusta Chronicle’s Spotted section (in turn, reused by myself here).
• I can vouch for Boston Globe technology editor DC Denison when he says he uses Flickr and such like to search for photos for breaking stories. Tip: Watch Flickr, Technorati and other servers, search for key tags to monitor the developing ecology. Covering a conference? You’re helped when people pick and use a common tag to group photos for you (ie. lesblogs, bloggercon, supernova).