Citizen journalists are satisfying the 24/7 thirst for news images like never before. Can amateur and professional photographers work side-by-side? Chris Cheesman reports on a growing phenomenon
Picture the scene. It is a dull Monday morning as a man crosses Vauxhall Bridge in London on his way to work. All appears normal to Chris Follows. But 15 December 2014 would turn out to be anything but routine.
This passer-by was about to witness a breaking news event. Luckily, he was carrying a camera phone and was equipped for the job.
Chris spotted a speedboat looming into view from the murkiness of the River Thames. A colleague quipped that James Bond may be at the helm, the scene being close to the Secret Intelligence Service building MI6. To the pair’s astonishment, actor Daniel Craig then appeared in full Technicolor – as James Bond.
Chris quickly reached for his iPhone and managed to grab a video as the boat passed underneath the bridge.
The spur-of-the-moment clip turned out to be some of the frst footage of the making of upcoming Bond flm Spectre, especially newsworthy at the time, because of reports of a script leak after a cyber attack on computers at Sony Pictures.
Chris promptly uploaded the video to YouTube and tweeted the link, which was gobbled up by the Metro newspaper and Newsfare, a UK-based citizen journalism website. The footage then appeared on other news websites, yet Chris says he did not receive payment, nor did he seek any, telling AP he was simply keen to share his news and watch the public reaction play out online. He was happy just to get a credit.
‘It was not something I was particularly looking for. It just happened… The reaction was fantastic,’ he says. ‘I like putting my stuff out there. If it’s on social media, it’s up for grabs, in my opinion.’
And therein lies the insidious threat for some professional press photographers, who fear that the media’s use of free images puts their jobs at risk.
Although Bond’s derring-dos are not exactly ‘hard’ news, on-the-scene smartphone photos document world events like never before. They are responsible for breaking some of today’s biggest international stories, and bolstering others, including the 2005 bombings on London transport and the Arab Spring uprisings.
Documenting civil upheaval is no longer the preserve of mainstream media, as protesters turn their cameras not only on fellow demonstrators, but also towards those in power, holding authority fgures to account in confict zones where access for traditional journalists is restricted, or simply too dangerous. After the toppling of the Hosni Mubarak regime in Egypt in February 2011, Hani Shukrallah, former editor of news website Ahram Online, took part in a panel discussion on freedom of expression and the press, in Cairo.
‘It’s the new media, the people’s media, that exposes the truth,’ he said during his address, which was covered by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Malek Blacktoviche, a former IT worker from Aleppo, Syria, has spoken of how he is regularly spurred into documenting the country’s civil war using his digital camera. His work begins at the sound of explosions.
‘I run as fast as I can towards the place where the bombs struck. I capture photos and fi lm the devastation and the deaths,’ he told opendemocracy.net.
Others are on the scene more as a bystander than in response to a pre-planned journalistic mission.
In 2009, Christopher La Jaunie, a banker, captured vital footage of what turned out to be the crucial final moments in the life of newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson, who died after being pushed to the ground by police during the protests against the 2009 G20 summit in London. Similarly, during last year’s unrest in Ferguson in the US, Thee Pharoah, a singer, witnessed the murder of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown and immediately posted a photo on Twitter.
More recently, a video of the cold-blooded murder of policeman Ahmed Merabet outside the Charlie Hebdo magazine offi ces in Paris was uploaded to Facebook by Jordi Mir, an engineer.
Social media revolution
Citizen journalism is not new, but the internet revolution has fuelled its potential, the relentless clamour for news images and video reaching fever pitch with the immediacy and accessibility of social media. The trend has spawned dedicated online services, including photo app Scoopshot, which the London Evening Standard newspaper used to aid its coverage of the Tour de France in 2014, for example.
Gareth Vipers is an online editor at the Standard – one of 70 organisations worldwide regularly using content provided via the Finland-based app.
‘Twitter has transformed the way we approach news, in the same way as [the paper’s] interaction with our readers – who are often on the scene of a story before we are,’ he says. ‘Scoopshot has enabled us to access great images from around London at a moment’s notice.’
So, is there a living to be made for the eagle-eyed? By 2014, Scoopshot, a free app that has been downloaded around 600,000 times, had paid out more than $1\2 million to amateur and professional users worldwide. An image of Venus passing in front of the sun was among the top earners, garnering $170 for the photographer.
There are not always rich pickings from a single image, but Scoopshot contributor Arto Mäkelä pulls in the bucks by submitting lots of them. Equipped with a DSLR and a smartphone, he has quickly racked up earnings of 20,000 Euro.
Mäkelä supplies event photos for news agencies – his largest payout for a single image being a 50 Euro shot of a Finland hockey championship.
Scoopshot takes up to 30 per cent commission – less if the photo is for a ‘task’ set by the buyer.
The real cash fl ooded in for Mäkelä when a directory service company created a task, challenging Scoopshot users to photograph every company in Finland, paying 1.50 Euro for each one.
‘I just started biking and driving around, taking pictures and enjoying the view,’ says Mäkelä.
Danger zones
Money aside, there are obvious dangers in putting yourself in the eye of the breaking news storm.
It’s a dangerous profession. According to the International Federation of Journalists, 118 journalists and media staff were killed in 2014, and 17 more perished in natural disasters and accidents while on assignment.
Recent Hollywood crime thriller Nightcrawler tells the compelling fictional tale of amateur videographer Lou Bloom, who makes a living by selling gruesome video footage of night-time car crashes and crime scenes to TV news channels in Los Angeles. He races to be first on the scene. His earnest assistant – who is killed by a gunman – becomes part of the visual story.
Hollywood hyperbole or a real-life threat? A prominent former Fleet Street photographer, who asked not be named, says: ‘Little consideration seems to be given to the danger some news situations may present to the unwary “citizen journalist”.
‘A lack of knowledge of the basic rules has seen some using their camera phones within the precincts of a Crown Court, the unfortunate hopefuls finding that instead of seeing their picture of some law-breaking miscreant “on the telly”, they’re invited to sample the inside of a prison cell, minus their camera phone.’
Notwithstanding publication, taking people photos without permission can aggravate a sensitive subject, as AP readers know.
AP has anecdotal evidence of unrest in parts of Ilford, in northeast London, for example, where ‘authority fi gures’ have apparently cracked down on street photos. Demotix, a photojournalism website that lists ‘ordinary people’ among its 30,000 contributors, admits that photojournalists of any level can be hurt or killed. Although not a belt-and-braces guide to safety, the site’s training page contains helpful links to other organisations’ websites, including www.newssafety.org.
User-generated discontent
The BBC invites budding citizen journalists to send in what is known in the trade as user-generated content. However, the BBC does not generally pay for material. Its terms state that it will only pay for usergenerated content ‘in exceptional circumstances for BBC News’.
Some professionals are fearful of a free pictures market, or of reporters equipped with iPhones replacing them, as seems to have happened at the Chicago Sun-Times, for example.
In the UK, Newsquest recently became the latest newspaper publisher to announce reductions in its quota of photographers, partly as a result of the increased use of pictures submitted from ‘external sources’, according to a report by the National Union of Journalists.
‘There is no question that the rise of citizen journalism has had a catastrophic effect on professional news photographers…’ says Nottingham-based photojournalist Pete Jenkins.
Can amateurs and professionals work side-by-side? Jenkins says: ‘If the question is, “Can the public reliably replace the quality, speed and professionalism of the dedicated professional?” then I suppose it could happen on rare occasions, but on a regular basis – you’re having a laugh, aren’t you?’
Broken news
As many news outlets trawl social media for ‘free’ material, traditional agencies have been badly hit, complains AP’s unnamed, nowretired Fleet Street source.
‘Many regional news agencies that relied on such commissions either no longer exist or have had to dramatically downsize, reducing the aspiring photographer’s career chances of getting in on the bottom rung of the profession.’
In pre-digital times, an amateur contributor would be paid ‘the going rate’, he explains. ‘Even if not used, newspaper picture desks - as a goodwill gesture - would invariably give an amateur a few rolls of film for their trouble. Sadly, such goodwill seemed to fly out of the window when new technology came knocking at the door.’
With technology enabling 500 million tweets and 70 million pictures to be posted on Instagram each day, potential breaking news is around every corner for the keen amateur.
Sometimes, you just have to be on the right corner, at the right time. And being armed with 21st-century technology helps, as our Bond video tweeter points out: ‘Last time this happened in a big way was when I accidentally got ushered into Downing Street through the main gates when Tony Blair was elected [in 1997]… I was just passing at the right time, and got some photos on fi lm, but there was no way to share them like there is now.’