Citizen Journalism: Part Disaster Photos, Part UFOs

These are giddy times for citizen journalism. Venture capital is flowing, blogs are atwitter, and it's hard to resist the storyline of do-it-yourself amateur photographers and reporters trouncing the hapless mainstream media. In recent months, many major news services have partnered with or launched user-generated content services—perhaps as an insurance policy.

But there's reason to be skeptical. Citizen journalism Web sites are overrun with mundane work, especially in photography.

A recent visit to NowPublic.com, one of the most successful citizen journalism sites, revealed the following gems among its "best" photos of the day: Smoke from a distant forest fire somewhere in Montana, a smudgy blur labeled "UFO CAPTURED IN FLIGHT!," and the exterior of a pancake house captioned simply "Mmm... IHop!" Also popular were pictures of flowers, a blurry image of Barry Bonds's back apparently shot from the stands of a Giants game, and screen grabs from TV news.

Not that the citizens don't occasionally rise to the occasion. In two recent disasters—a steam pipe explosion in Manhattan and the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis—audience-submitted photos were a big part of breaking news coverage.

The Associated Press wire service moved 66 such images in the first two days after the bridge collapse, including some from NowPublic (an AP partner) within about three hours of the event. AP researchers also secured permission to use photos from community sites Flickr and Facebook.

"Of all the stories I've covered over 20 years or more, this is the one where I've seen the most volume of content coming in from sources we wouldn't have worked with in the past," says AP director of photography Santiago Lyon.

Another success story was CNN's iReport, which put user-submitted photos on TV and online within minutes of the bridge collapse. You Witness News, a partnership between Reuters and Yahoo!, reeled in amateur photos of the steam explosion and the bridge failure, which were published by outlets including MSNBC. com.

Tech-minded entrepreneurs are trying to turn this into a business, soliciting digital photos from amateur shutterbugs in the hope of netting saleable images. Some are marketing text and video as well. This summer, two of the biggest citizen agencies, NowPublic and Associated Content, each received $10 million influxes of venture capital. On the flip side, a hyper-local news site called Backfence shut down.

Each site has its own character and personality, but so far none is rocking the photojournalism world. One problem is that a few active users saturate the sites with photos of ordinary public events.

"You can't walk down the street and wait for a plane to fall out of the sky or a building to blow up," admits Kyle MacRae, founder of the Scotland-based citizen photojournalism site Scoopt, which was purchased earlier this year by Getty Images.

Among MacRae's challenges is spreading word about Scoopt; the broad reach of Getty is helping. Scoopt's successes include coverage of the 2006 crash of Cory Lidle's airplane in New York, when a person in a nearby apartment took some photos and found Scoopt through a Google search.

"The goal is to get lucky every time," MacRae says.

Citizen journalism sites relish the idea of upstaging the mass media, but they are largely dependent on newspapers and other big outlets to license their images. It could be a tense relationship, but people in the business say it is getting stronger.

"They're actually taking us a lot more seriously instead of laughing us out the door," says Joe Bransom, co-founder and president of photo site Citizen Image. One of Citizen Image's plans is a text message service that will notify members if something newsy is happening nearby.

"It's big. Everybody wants to do it," says Mick Cochran, USA Today's director of photography. USA Today recently revamped its Web site to allow more reader interaction, but it is treading carefully with photos. The newspaper's print edition has published few if any reader-submitted images.

Like most people interviewed for this story, Cochran sees citizen photography as a complement to professional work, not a replacement for it. "There's still a quantum leap from one to the other," he says.

And unlike professional work, money seems to be an afterthought. Citizen agencies only pay contributors if pictures sell, and most pictures don't. TV networks and wire services routinely accept amateur photographs for free, realizing that bystanders who have just witnessed a disaster are more eager to share their story than to cash in.

As audiences get savvier about media, it's easy to imagine them souring to the notion that citizen journalism sites are staying afloat off content they provide for free.