A new idea?

Citizen generated content used to be relegated to the Sunday Op-Ed pieces or Letters to the Editor in the main stream media, maybe the occasional hard-to-find fanzine. Enter the internet and citizen generated content explodes. There may be a few people out there unaware of blogs or sites like Flickr. Then again, those same people may be using their mouse as a foot pedal. News bloggers are becoming as influential as the New York Times, media credential request forms now ask if you have a website, celebrity bloggers are used as sources for weekly magazines and today's Webster's Dictionary - Wikipedia- is edited by anyone and everyone. I wonder how many teachers shudder when they get Wikipedia listed as a primary source on a research paper?

Citizen photojournalism has been getting a lot of press lately. The horrifying photos and video of the plane crashing into the World Trade Center and the abuse photos from Abu Ghraib were generated by citizens. Saddam Hussein's execution on the camera phone video shows a different story than the government mandated execution video. Michael Richard's angry, racist tirade might never have received the press it did without the cellphone camera documentation. The UCLA student who was repeatedly tazed by college police might have been a small item found on the back of page 11.

With Reuters and Yahoo embracing the phenomenon, I think we can safely say that news resulting from citizen images is here to stay. Just in time to celebrate the 100th anniversary of citizen photojournalism! Six years after the introduction of the Brownie Camera, San Francisco was rocked to the core by the 1906 earthquake. The names of the photographers have been lost to time, but the power of their images still remains. Citizens photographed all aspects of one of the greatest natural disasters the US has every experienced and many of their photographs live to tell the tale.