Have a camera phone? Give us your news or celebrity video and photos for free.
The Yahoo! and Reuters Citizen Journalist initiative Basically, Yahoo! and Reuters are banking on an army of citizen journalists who will submit photos and video taken from camera phones and submit the bulk of them for free with a small percentage generating a yet disclosed "relatively small" amount of money.
The Citizen Journalist movement is a very compelling trend that I hope expands to decentralize and diversify coverage from the insulated media machine. While this movement is not specifically within the scope of IPTV and this site, I was intrigued by a quote by Lloyd Braun, who runs the Yahoo! Media Group. Mr. Braun said,
"People don't say, 'I want to see user-generated content', " said Lloyd Braun, who runs Yahoo's media group. "They want to see Michael Richards in the club.
Granted and there a many YouTube pages dedicated to Mr. Richards and people are fascinated with celebrity however, this does not account for the 80-100Mil downloads per day much of which are of average events by regular people. Mr. Braun as you may recall was brought into Yahoo! to build their original content creation division for IPTV, a bold idea that the company soon abandoned,
The photo to the left was of the moving of the Intrepid
this morning, taken during my morning ferry commute into New York City. There were a dozen people snapping photos and perhaps video with their cell phones but I doubt the networks with circling helicopters and trucks on the shoreline are going to be interested in paying for these. What will likely happen is that people will upload them to MySpace, YouTube (in the case of video) and share them with other people.
If the networks, Yahoo! and Reuters want your photos, or video of news events then make them pay for them, after all their production crews are not working free, unless you want to?
If you are looking for a more equitable arrangement, look at Scoopt, which indicates a 50/50% rev share model.
Unlike give away most of your rights with Yahoo!, Scoopt has a more straightforward arrangement.
'We don't 'sell' photos at all. Instead, we re-license them for publication in a number of different ways. This is an important distinction because it means the photo remains your property at all times. In legalese, you retain the copyright".
Some of the fine print of the agreement to their service:
You retain ownership to Your Content that You submit for inclusion into the Service. However, by submitting Your Content to Yahoo!, You hereby grant Yahoo! the following worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sublicensable and transferable rights and licenses:
Yahoo! reserves and has the right to sell, license and/or display any advertising, promotional and distribution rights in connection with Your Content, and Yahoo! will be entitled to retain any and all revenue generated from any sales or licenses of such advertising, promotional or distribution rights.
There apparently is a termination portion however, if you actually obtain the next big news story this would be put to the test.
The foregoing licenses granted by You shall terminate once You remove or delete, or request removal or deletion of, as applicable, Your Content from the Service and the removal has been processed on Yahoo!'s backend.
