August 26, 2013

WTVR | The Washington Post | Columbia Daily Tribune

A drone carrying a camera crashed into the grandstand at The Great Bull Run in Dinwiddie, Va., Saturday. The event promised to bring “the Spanish tradition of the running of the bulls to the United States!

The drone did not, as this post originally said, belong to WTVR. “In fact, due to liability concerns, WTVR does not use drones in any of its news or broadcast coverage,” WTVR General Manager Stephen P. Hayes writes in an email to Poynter.

In The Washington Post, Martin Weil says the mishap “might be described as the dramatic encounter between a controversial piece of hardware and a controversial spectacle.”

Four or five people were treated for minor injuries, Weil reports. In the video below, you can see the drone dance gaily above the crowd until it plummets.

“It just hit a dude in the face!” one of the commentators announces.

The FAA recently directed the University of Missouri and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to discontinue flights at their drone-journalism programs. The agency “considers the journalism drones to be ‘public aircraft’ and the university to be a public operator, which places it in a more restrictive category than amateurs,” Rudi Keller reports.

Related: What journalists need to know about drones

Correction: This post originally said the drone belonged to WTVR. It did not.

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Andrew Beaujon reported on the media for Poynter from 2012 to 2015. He was previously arts editor at TBD.com and managing editor of Washington City…
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