Digital Home Thoughts: Yahoo, Reuters Seek Cell-Phone Photos but Don't Pay Up

"On Monday, Yahoo and Reuters announced a partnership not merely to publish the cell phone photos of so-called "civic journalists," but also to solicit their photos. The two companies will sponsor a Web site that lets people with camera and video phones upload their content for potential inclusion on Yahoo News and Reuters.com. The service is called You Witness News and the idea is simple. Thousands of eyewitness accounts are captured by Average Joes with cell phones each day. They use the built-in cameras on their phones to snap photos or videos that frequently make their way around the world. And very often, those amateur photos are the only eyewitness accounts of important events, until professional photographers and photojournalists arrive at the scene."

Very nice idea and it totally makes sense. Photo journalism and blogging has become very popular off late, so clearly people are willing to share the photos they take with large audiences. With Yahoo and Reuters supporting this effort, those pictures will make it to websites faster and will hit a much larger audience. I just wonder how they will prune pictures down to the set they need if they start receiving a very large number of images. Maybe they will require people to pre-tag their images? Maybe even rate users over time on the reliability of their images? I don't know how scalable any of this will be.