November 3, 2004
Cell Phones Increasingly Used to Snap the News
Reuters (via Eyebeam reBlog) reports that twice in one month De Telegraaf, the biggest Dutch newspaper, published front-page pictures shot by mobile phone users.
Wednesday, the daily published a picture of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh who was probably killed by an Islamic militant.
Passerby Aron Boskma took a picture with his cell phone at the scene of the crime in Amsterdam. News photographers arrived only after the corpse had been covered, leaving Boskma's picture the only one showing knives plunged into the body.
As more and more "ordinary" people are now carrying camphones, the trend of using phones to snap the news is growing.
In Sweden, a ferry collision filmed with a cell phone was shown on national television last year. Last month, Dutch newspapers published photographs shot with a cell phone from a police shoot-out in the town of Enschede, made available to Dutch news agency ANP.
ANP receives camera phone pictures through a collaboration with Internet news Web site Nu, which offers money and prizes to amateur photographers who send in pictures.
In Japan, it has become common to sell pictures to television stations and other media outlets.
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