Unpaid Hacks Magically Become "Citizen Journalists"
Citizen journalists! Throw off your chains. And put on these nice new chains provided by Reuters and Yahoo!, who would like to absorb your content for free into their You Witness News aggregator. Submit photos (via Yahoo's Flickr) or video, and perhaps Yahoo! will incorporate them into their newsfeeds. Reuters might even do the same if your pics and flicks are really good. And if everyone agrees, maybe they'll even deign to pay you a little bit of something. No particular ideas on how any of this might work, though there's a poignant quote from just-defenestrated Yahoo! exec Lloyd Braun in this New York Times article from earlier in the week. Two days after launch, YWN hosts barely a dozen photos harvested from Flickr, plus a couple slideshows. Judging by the similarly anemic CNN effort ("Exchange"), it looks like "citizen journalism" suffers from the same disinterested malaise afflicting citizens in general. May be a clever ploy by Reuters to destroy citizen journalism by handing it to meme-killer Yahoo, in which case we say, good job.
