With the increased popularity of sharing sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Youtube it has become increasingly easy for members of these sites to post their images of everyday happenings, which can occasionally include newsworthy events.
"There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy."
Posted on January 15, 2009
As a consequence searching social networking sites for content has become standard procedure for news organisations. A famous example was in the aftermath of January's Haiti earthquake,
Daniel Morel posted images of the disaster on his Twitter account, almost instantly he was contacted by the director of photography for the Associated Press asking if they could do a deal for his images.
However, news organsations also have to be extremely careful about the content they use. In the same Haiti disaster four news agencies distributed incorrect images sourced from social networking sites. One such case was from the French newspaper
Libération dedicated an article to Haiti and included amongst other images was one that was not in fact taken in Haiti but from the aftermath of a 2008 earthquake in China also taken from Twitter. This is not the only difficulty in the use of social networking media, there is the problem of identifying and contacting the true copyright owner of that image, all before is image is cross posted on other user accounts.
Nevertheless the process has become an invaluable tool for the media industry to get raw eyewitness content directly from the heart of an event.
