Citizen Media @ APME – Panel 5

AP’s “Now Public” Initiative

Lou Ferrara, Deputy Managing Editor,

Multimedia and Sports, Associated Press

“If you know anything about the AP, you know AP is about iconic images in journalism. And many of those photos are taken by citizens”

The watershed moments for citizens as news-contributors were international disasters and crises: The Southeast Asian tsunami, the London public transit bombings, Hurricane Katrina.   That’s when people in the news industry realized that user-generated content is here to stay, said AP’s Lou Ferrara. “The landscape has changed, but we’re still about getting this information. What’s the best way to do it? Do we outsource, partner, do it ourselves?

The Associated Press has to be particularly careful and set the bar especially high. “People try to submit bogus material to us because they know if they can get it into the AP pipeline, it’s going to be everywhere.”

“We decided we needed control in order to have editorial integrity. We didn’t want to have CSI [crime scene investigation] journalists sitting at computers trying to figure out when it’s been digitized and uploaded and from where …”

So, the AP went to NowPublic, an international site for crowd sourced news. “The AP is everywhere, but we can’t be everywhere all the time,” Ferrara acknowledged, ” These folks have citizens all over.”

All AP bureaus can reach out to out to NowPublic, primarily for images and video and less so for news copy. Ferrara said this has transformed the culture of the AP newsroom. One recent example was a cyclone in Oman. It would have taken AP a day to get there, but it got photos the same day by working with NowPublic.

More recent events where the news media were looking for citizen contributions include the bridge collapse in Minnesota and the Virginia Tech shooting. The AP got tons and tons of citizen images of the bridge collapse since there were many witnesses who were safe and nearby, but not a lot of photos from Virginia Tech. Ferrara said, “What we learned is that if you are fearing for your life, you tend to duck for cover. If you are being shot at, you generally don’t shoot photos.”

Ferrara said that news organizations must be patient with amateur contributors. In his experience, citizens don’t instantly upload their photos or video since they have a life independent of the news cycle. It can take a whole day before the best images surface. And Ferrara said that not all the best content comes to them; AP also goes out in search of citizen-generated content. For example, they scoured Facebook for photos of the bridge collapse and wound up purchasing a bunch from one citizen photographer.

Ferrara hopes that the collaboration with NowPublic will help people better understand what the AP is looking for in photojournalism. “We’ve set up a page on NowPublic on how to take great photos, along with images showing why we used them. The photos need to be images that include people, illustrate the scale, the human emotion, the context of a story.”