Citizen photojournalism: changing the visual order of the news Mervi Pantti

Ethics How do professional news organizations in the Netherlands react to amateur images? 2 National newscasts 2 Local TV news 3 National newspapers 2 Free newspapers 3 Local papers

Pro-am model Democratisation of professional news media Enrichment and corrective for journalism Means for cheap and compelling material Thread for journalism’s authority

User-generated content UGC is mainly text Published mainly online Moderation Payment is an issue Three categories: 1.news images (accidents and crime) 2.weather / nature picture 3.human interest

Misfortunes Before we had footage, we already had video from people who filmed it themselves, 15 minutes after it happened

Sunsets

Memories

Authenticity I used news photos from blogs in Burma. It’s definitely more authentic; it brings the news closer to you It looks good, even if it’s badly filmed, with a moving camera, shaking images. It offers a lot of authenticity.

Responsibility On Internet we published the picture without any problems. But when we wanted to put it in the newspaper, there were a lot of discussions. (…) Internet is different. What we do to our own TV material, we also do to this material.

I believe in user-generated content but I don’t believe that users can decide what is news. Checking facts, something citizen journalists don’t do, is a condition to call it journalism. Authority

Discussion No threat to authority No collaboration, just more sources ‘Hard news’ images are rare Images have other (unexpected) values Community building as main goal