Yahoo & Reuters team up on user generated content
December 4, 2006
Yahoo have teamed up with Reuters to begin a push into news related user generated content. They’ll be inviting the public to submit eyewitness photos and videos of news events.
Yahoo will allow users to submit related photo’s on their site, they will go through some kind of vetting process one would assume and then end up published on Yahoo meta-tagged as related to a particular story. The images wil be run as part of topical packages on the site, I guess meaning that as big news stories break Yahoo will build the content around those stories.
The You Witness system will be expanded to take content for sports, entertainment etc in the future, but news will be the initial push. The content will be shared with Reuters after a few months of testing on Yahoo only.
Yahoo and Reuters are working on a way to compensate contributors when their media is used in a commercial manner, which should ensure a good level of submission as budding photographers and journalists everywhere try to get in on the act.
Yahoo’s had a few good ideas lately, making use of their purchases such as Flickr in this case in some innovative ways is always good for their PR factor.
