Last Thursday, a fighter jet crashed in rural Franklin County, Va., 20 miles south of Roanoke. The first person to see the wreckage was a loyal TV news viewer who was armed with a cell phone camera.
In an e-mail to WSLS-TV in Roanoke, Elizabeth Jamison wrote that she was driving when her daughter Amy shouted, "Mom, look!"
Amy shouted again, "Go, go on!" As the pair stopped their car on top of a hill, they spotted a ball of fire and heard an explosion.
"At that point I didn't know what I was seeing other than a ball of fire," Jamison wrote. It turned out to be an Air Force F-15E (Strike Eagle) fighter jet that had crashed. Early reports from the crew indicated they may have struck a flock of birds in flight.
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Elizabeth Jamison/Courtesy of WSLS-TV
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Jamison said she and her daughter spotted two parachuters in the sky. They stopped by a hair salon and found that police had already been called.
Then Jamison used her cell phone for another purpose — she snapped some pictures that she sent to WSLS-TV.
In the last year, journalists have been using cell phone photos from viewers and readers more often, and with the remarkable growth of the photo-phone industry, there's no doubt newsrooms will soon have access to even more images.
Columnist Bert Lum at The Honolulu Advertiser says:
Lately, more serious uses are taking shape in the form of moblogging journalism.
Many of these moblogging trends are reported on weblogs dedicated to cam phones. A quick sampling of informative blogs: picturephoning.com, www.wirelessmoment.com, and Howard Rheingold's smartmobs.com.
What started with video and digital cameras is becoming pervasive with cam phones. Now anyone with a cam phone can be at the right place at the right time.
There are tons of questions about how and whether newsrooms should publish or air such images.
The most important questions include:
- How do you know the image is authentic?
- What do you know/need to know about how the image was captured?
- What was the photographer's involvement in the incident he or she captured?
- How do you keep from encouraging people to take unnecessary or dangerous risks in order to capture a photograph?
- Will you compensate people for images? How will you decide how much to pay?
- How much are you willing to compromise your standards of quality in order to use a cell image?
- How easy is it for people to send you images and how easy is it for you to use them?
I wanted to learn more about how the Roanoke TV station made decisions to use the jet crash images, so I interviewed WSLS news anchor and managing editor John Carlin by e-mail:
Tompkins: How quickly did she send the photos to you and how quickly did you use them? Where did you use them (breaking news cut-in, online, newscast, and so on)?
Carlin: The plane crashed at 5:10 p.m.; pix arrived at 9:29 p.m. We used them in the 11 p.m. news. But I'm sure we would have used them during 45 minutes of nearly wall-to-wall coverage when we were filling with phone reports from witnesses and reporters just arriving at the location -- about 45 minutes from the station. (We also asked viewers to send us photos if they had them -- these were the only ones we received, but we did dub a digital camera "movie" at the satellite truck -- which aired at 6.) I can't guarantee that we would have been as thorough under those circumstances. We were scrambling for anything we could get. If we will take the word of a witness over the phone -- wouldn't we also take the photos? (I'd like a collective take on that question!)
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Elizabeth Jamison/Courtesy of WSLS-TV
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What was the process of verification you used to authenticate the images?
These were easy to authenticate because we had our own video back from the scene, and they were consistent with our video. I also called the woman and asked her some basic questions until I was satisfied that she was legit. In addition, Jamison is a common name in that part of the viewing area, just further indication that she was local. (I lived not far from there for 13 years.)
What systems does your station have in place to get images like this on the air? What do you wish you had?
We use viewer photos on a regular basis for weather-related incidents, and usually have our graphic artist pre-produce them. We can actually take a picture live on the air directly from the website if we choose. We have a device marketed as the Scan Do Pro II, which puts the Web on the air directly from our switcher.
So others can learn from you, how would you handle a situation like this differently in the future?
In this case, I'm not sure we would have handled it differently, because it played into our show so well and we had the time to do it right. I read an excerpt from the e-mail and showed the pictures as the third or fourth element in our coverage of the crash -- well after the nuts and bolts of the story. I WISH we had the photos (with verification) prior to 6 p.m. so we could have added better visuals to the story.
