Photo Phones Portend Visual Revolution

By: Steve Outing Over the years of writing this column, I've covered lots of trends in new media. Today's trend combines one that's several years old (user-generated content) with new technology (photo-enabled mobile phones) to create a powerful new force that likely will influence news media in major ways.

What I'm talking about can best be shown with some examples:

* After the space shuttle Columbia disaster, when pieces of the spacecraft were scattered over many square miles and several states, The Dallas Morning News asked readers to send in reports and digital photos of shuttle debris that they spotted -- and created a Web database of the information and images.

* Several weekends ago, BBC News asked its worldwide audience to send in digital images taken with photo phones from anti-war protests held around the globe, and it published the best ones.

* ProJo.com, the Web site of The Providence (R.I.) Journal, invited readers to send in digital photos taken during the recent blizzard that passed through, then created a slide show of more than 130 images.

While photos submitted by amateurs have long appeared -- occasionally -- on news pages, the now-ubiquitous digital camera and the soon-to-be-ubiquitous photo phone are likely to increase the availability of images that a small photojournalism staff can't get to, or are not in place to capture. It means that more news will carry a visual element, because there are more eyes and cameras on hand at any significant news event.

This is much bigger than when video camcorders became popular in the early 1990s. People don't tend to carry camcorders with them wherever they go -- but a cellular phone is always in a purse or pocket. And many new phone models have built-in digital cameras that allow users to instantly transmit photos via the phone.

I predict it will be common for newspapers to publish images of significant news events where professional photojournalists weren't present but camera-toting amateurs were. Newspaper Web sites, where there's plenty of room to publish images, will also be an outlet for pictures taken by readers.

Pity the picture editor

Photojournalism experts agree that in general this is a worthy trend -- more published news images is something to applaud -- but it's not without its challenges.

Foremost, this could create a logistical nightmare for picture editors, those newsroom managers charged with deciding what images make the newspaper and/or get published on a news Web site. Frequently overburdened already, these editors could be really harried if a wave of images from the public comes crashing into the newsroom. If the trend of using reader-supplied digital photos accelerates, you could see photographers or other editorial staffers called in as photo-editing back-up support.

That's the likely scenario for a major news event nowadays, says Kenny Irby, a visual journalism faculty member at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla. Should a terrorist attack occur in a major metro area, for instance, where digital-camera-toting witnesses are present but photojournalists are not, local news organizations could be flooded with public-submitted pictures of the attack in progress.

Irby says news photo departments need to have a disaster plan in place for such situations -- a back-up team of people to be extra sets of eyes (temporary back-up picture editors) to pore over public submissions of photos. Newspaper photo departments in recent years have been cut back, with many researchers and photo assistants laid off, Irby points out, so it may be that an art director with an eye for photo-editing work or a visually talented news or copy editor can be called into action. The important thing is to have a plan, so the photo department is not overwhelmed.

Beware the fake

Deciding what to run from what's submitted by the public is not as simple as it may sound, points out Michael Scherer, president of the National Press Photographers Association and a faculty member at the University of Nebraska at Omaha's department of communication. When you get an image from an amateur with whom you do not have a previous relationship, do you really know what you're getting? he asks.

With the ubiquity of sophisticated image-editing software like Photoshop, editors need to be very careful about what they take in from the public. For an instance where, say, a crowd member with a digital camera at a presidential visit has snapped a photo of a man with a gun -- a legitimate and important news story should it be genuine -- how can you know that the image hasn't been altered on a computer? That's not a worry with your staff photographer, but he/she wasn't in position to snap that important photo.

Even mundane examples can raise doubt. Take, for example, this photo of snow sliding off a roof from projo.com's slide show of public-submitted blizzard shots. It would have been fairly easy for a computer user to tweak this image with Photoshop to exaggerate the amount of snow. (That image is probably legitimate; I just used it to make the point.) "In many cases, you're just taking [public-submitted photos] on pure blind faith," Scherer says.

That's an interesting comment, because in general, photojournalism is held to a high standard of ethics. Scherer points out that a professional photojournalist could have his reputation severely tarnished just by editing out a power line from a news photo. That's even more strict than the ethics of some reporters, he suggests, many of whom think nothing of tweaking a quote to fix a grammar error of an interviewee.

So, how do you stick to high-minded professional ethics when you're dealing with photos from the public? Irby recommends using trained picture editors when dealing with public-submitted photos -- don't just toss them on the Web without thinking first. His advice:

1. Learn about the source of the photo, and ask about his/her photographic experience.

2. Require a raw file from the amateur photographer; a professional photo editor should be able to spot an obviously faked photo.

3. Ask for a "wider take" -- that is, the images taken immediately before and after the shot that you're thinking of publishing -- which could give you a clue if something funny is going on. "You can't just take a photo from anybody anymore," Irby cautions. "Several [news organizations] have gotten burned" in recent years.

Pros keep the edge

Gary Fong, director of editorial graphics technology at the San Francisco Chronicle and the paper's former photo director, says he might use a public-submitted photo depending on the content. A photo-phone image of that would-be assassin at a presidential appearance might go in the paper if no staff photographer had something as powerful, Fong says, as long as he could feel assured it was legitimate.

Generally, photo editors will want to stick with their own whenever possible. Scherer says there's usually going to be a noticeable difference between amateur and professional shots. The times that amateur photos show up in the newspaper print edition are those where the content of the image is so powerful that it outweighs a lack of professional quality and the element-of-faith issue. He thinks that if anything, the more exposure that newspaper readers and online users get to amateur news photography, the more they'll notice, appreciate and demand the work of news pros.

Scherer emphasizes that it's important for news organizations to properly identify public-submitted photos, and distinguish them from the work of professional photojournalists.

Fong thinks that for print editions, the reader-submitted photo trend is likely to be hotter for smaller papers than large ones. Small photo staffs and the desire to photographically cover small news events -- say, student athletics -- can be addressed by allowing community members to send in digital photos to the local newspaper and its Web site. A small army of parents with photo phones could ensure that high-school football games are well covered with images delivered electronically to the newsroom only minutes after the action.

A Web phenomenon

While professional caution might keep most public-contributed photo-phone and digital-camera images off the pages of newspapers, there's less wariness on newspaper Web sites. Most of the user-photo projects seen so far are collections of images on a specific news topic or event. For example, ABC News Online of Australia in January produced a page featuring images and personal accounts of major brushfires in Canberra, the country's capital.

Snow seems to be a popular topic for user-contributed photo features. In January, Santa Rosa, Calif., had its first significant snowstorm in more than 50 years. When local residents woke up, they ran outside and took pictures of their back yards -- which they'd never seen covered in snow before. The Web site of The Press Democrat put a request for photos on its home page, and by the end of the day had 50 submissions, and 150 by the end of the week, according to online content manager Catherine Thorpe.

All contributed photos were used. "The idea was to create a multi-faceted community experience rather than a showcase of top-notch images," says Thorpe, who hopes to run more user-contributed photos in the future, perhaps inviting readers to participate in a section called "Be a Reporter."

Another popular concept with news sites right now is featuring photos and biographies of local military personnel who have been sent to the Middle East for a possible war with Iraq. Many of the stations in the New York Times Broadcast Group, for example, are collecting photos of soldiers heading to the Mideast. KFOR-TV in Oklahoma City is soliciting photos and plans to roll them into a database, according to KFOR.com Internet content manager Michael Gunstanson. The station also may close some of its TV newscasts with these photos.

At WXYZ-TV in Detroit, news anchors are asking people to send in their photos of loved ones heading to the Mideast. The "Faces From the Front" Web project presents these viewer-supplied photos as a simple presentation of photo thumbnails across the top, which bring more detail when clicked. (Go to DetNow.com and click on "Faces From the Front.") Says Web site manager Seth Myers, "Seeing all of the photos in a row is pretty powerful -- you see just how young these guys are."

There's no reason that such reader-photo features have to be confined to the Web. A logical approach is to run everything on the Web, then feature the best stuff in the print edition of a newspaper or on a local TV-news broadcast.

Should you run every photo that you receive from the public online? Some news organizations are doing that, though they do obviously screen to keep out reader-submitted spoof photos, pornography, etc.

While that approach is "democratic" and makes those who submit pictures happy, it's often not especially entertaining or interesting for Web users. With 150 or so images, many of them of poor quality, it's the rare soul who will click through all the submissions. The best approach to public news photography, in my view, is to treat them more like "letters to the editor" -- finding the best ones and highlighting them, and possibly putting all the rest in a less visible area for those with the patience to "separate the wheat from the chaff."

Have some fun

I'll close this column by pointing out that the reader-as-digital-photographer trend can be both serious and fun. The newspaper reader with the photo phone might be your best friend when she snaps a shot of a terrorist act in progress. On the lighter side, the possibilities are endless. As the BBC's Newsround reported in a recent story, one of the most popular UK Web sites is Dogs In Cars -- which publishes user-submitted photos of ... dogs in cars, of course. (Go figure.) News feature editors surely can match such creativity.

---

Other recent columns

Breaking-news Multimedia: Not an Oxymoron , Wednesday, Feb. 26
Top Online Media Execs See Bright Future , Wednesday, Feb. 12
Paid Content Trend Is Dangerous, Wednesday, Jan. 27
New Year Resolutions: Fix Archives, Ban Pop-ups, Wednesday, Jan. 8
2003 Predictions for Online News Biz, Wednesday, Dec. 18
Walking the Convergence Talk, Wednesday, Dec. 11
Previous columns

---

Stop the Presses! by e-mail

To be notified by e-mail when a new "Stop the Presses!" column has been published, sign up here.