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Army of amateurs covers disaster

Among the more striking photos appearing online after Thursday's coordinated London explosions was one of a double-decker bus, its front intact but its sides and top ripped open.

The image, on the BBC's Web site, came not from a staff photographer but from an amateur who happened on the scene with a digital camera.

With inexpensive cameras everywhere, including increasingly in cellphones, we're seeing more searing images than ever of human drama. The chances of getting poignant amateur video, meanwhile, are improving radically.

Following Thursday's morning rush hour blasts on the bus and at three subway stations, amateurs snapped shots before professional journalists could get to the scene.

The BBC posted one reader-contributed image showing subway passengers being led through tunnels and another of smoke filling another photographer's subway car.

It also posted camera phone video, including an 18-second clip of a passenger evacuating the subway. The image was dark and jerky but gave a sense of crisis.

"What you're doing is gathering material you never could have possibly got unless your reporter happened by chance to be caught up in this," said Vicky Taylor, interactivity editor for BBC News' Web sites.

Many amateur photos are mundane yet gripping, said Steve Jones, professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Visitors Thursday to the photo site Flickr, for instance, saw one sign at one station that simply stated, "Tube network closed."

While journalists descend on the stations where the explosions took place, an amateur might snap shots from "a train station that wasn't bombed but that has a lot of security, and you sort of immediately compare that to your own experience," Jones said.

Adam Tinworth, a London magazine editor, posted several shots from his camera on the Internet. Among them: images of blockaded streets and of professionals "trying to do the same thing I was except with a much different camera."

"I was grabbing photos to give people a feel of what it's like to be an ordinary person," Tinworth said.

Of course, the use of amateur photographs by professional news organizations is not new. News agencies routinely buy rights to photos produced by eyewitnesses.

But digital cameras and phones make more such images possible, and the Internet makes distribution easy. Many Web journals and Flickr let you post directly from a cellphone, while the BBC has an e-mail address for such photos.

Taylor said reader-submitted accounts from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were mostly text, while the BBC received several hundred photographs on Thursday and used about 70 on its Web site and on TV.

She said amateurs submitted photos to the BBC for free, but then some sold rights to other news organizations.

Jones said the quality has improved since the Sept. 11 attacks. Eyewitnesses in London were also more selective in what they posted online. The captions that they wrote were more descriptive and professional-sounding this time around, he said.

Nonetheless, user-generated digital imagery does create new challenges for news sites, which has to make sure a photo isn't already owned by someone else -- and that it wasn't digitally manipulated.

The BBC compared the bus image with shots its crews took from the rear, matching landmarks in both pictures to make sure it wasn't digitally doctored, Taylor said. For other pictures, the BBC contacted the photographers for verification.

There's also the task of sifting through all the images.

A half-day after the explosions, Flickr had 150 photos marked "explosions," 111 for "blasts" and 219 under "terrorism." More than 325 fell under "London bomb blasts."
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