Hoping to turn the millions of people who own digital cameras and camera phones into photojournalists, Yahoo and Reuters are introducing a new effort to showcase photographs and video of news events submitted by the public.
Starting today, the photos and videos submitted will be placed throughout Reuters.com and Yahoo News, the most popular news Web site in the US, according to comScore MediaMetrix.
Reuters said that it would also start to distribute some of the submissions next year to the thousands of print, online and broadcast media outlets that subscribe to its news service.
Reuters said it hoped to develop a service devoted entirely to user-submitted photographs and video.
"There is an ongoing demand for interesting and iconic images," said Chris Ahearn, the president of the Reuters media group.
He said the agency had always bought newsworthy pictures from individuals and part-time contributors known as stringers.
"This is looking out and saying, `What if everybody in the world were my stringers?"' Ahearn said.
The project is among the most ambitious efforts in what has become known as citizen journalism, attempts by bloggers, start-up local news sites and global news organizations like CNN and the BBC to see if readers can also become reporters.
Many news organizations turned to photographs taken by amateurs to supplement coverage of events like the London subway bombing and the Asian tsunami.
Yahoo's news division has already used images that were originally posted on Flickr, the company's photo-sharing site. It created a slide show of images from Thailand after the September coup.
The Yahoo-Reuters project will create a systematic way to incorporate images covering a wider range of subjects into news coverage.
Starting today, users will be able to upload photos and videos to a section of Yahoo called You Witness News (news.yahoo.com/page/youwitnessnews). All of the submissions will appear on Flickr or a similar site for video.
Editors at both Reuters and Yahoo will review the submissions and select some to place on pages with relevant news articles, just as professional photographs and video clips are woven into their news sites today.
Users will not be paid for any images displayed on the Yahoo and Reuters sites. But people whose photos or videos are selected for distribution to Reuters clients will receive a payment.
Ahearn said the company had not yet figured out how to structure those payments. The basic payment may be relatively small, but he said Reuters was likely to pay more to people offering rights to images of major events.
For now, no money is changing hands between Yahoo and Reuters, but if Reuters is able to create a separate news service with the user-created material, it will split the revenue with Yahoo.
Before photographs or videos are used on the Yahoo site or distributed by Reuters, photo editors at Reuters will try to vet them to weed out fraudulent or retouched images.
This is an imperfect process. Last summer, a blogger discovered that photos of the conflict in Lebanon by a freelance photographer working for Reuters had been digitally altered.
Reuters stopped using the photographer and withdrew his work from its archive. The company is now trying to develop software that will help in the detection of digitally altered photographs.
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