Fascinating development in personal content - a new company Scoopt are offering to act as agents for punters who capture newsworthy photos. So now personal content can make you money! And it is surely another major sign of the growing proximity between "ordinary" people and big media that photos taken by us are accepted as part of the news/entertainment output.
Scoopt are having to mount a PR defence against those who say their move is cynical and against the spirit of digital media. There was a good piece in Media Guardian (you'll have to register, but it is free)) quote:
......What all this suggests is
that despite the net providing people with a revolutionary way of
becoming journalists, it does not answer the central dilemma of
journalism itself: what is it for? Democratisation has burgeoned
alongside the "free" market economy that encourages people to believe
that everything, including information, has a price. Is that really so
great an advance?
Personally I think journalists can get a bit pompous when considering these issues, but Scoopt does not help its case with its home page which suggests that Concorde crashing is the sort of thing they are after....
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