Yahoo! and Reuters team up for crowdsourcing

Yahoo! and Reuters started accepting photos and videos of news events from users all over the internet to use in related online news articles this week. Both companies plan on taking advantage of the many people worldwide that use mobile devices and digital cameras to take shots of breaking news, aka crowdsourcing. This new program will be called You Witness News, with Reuters planning on distributing selected submissions for print and broadcast. As far as compensation goes for photo and video submissions, the companies are working on some kind of reward. Yahoo! plans to start the You Witness program by offering social rewards. These social rewards will be evident in the online profiles of news submission members who get mentioned in articles. Reuters is, however, planning on compensating submitters when it does distribute the materials to its clients. There is currently no word on how much the compensations will be. If done right, I think Yahoo! and Reuters can really harness the true powers of crowdsourcing. Pay the users a minimum of $20 per submission that actually gets used, and people will be hunting for breaking news. Thus pulling in a lot more traffic for both Yahoo! and Reuters news sites. What do you think? Would you submit breaking news for the opportunity to net some cash, or for a "social reward"?

Tags: crowdsourcing, photos, pictures, reuters, video, yahoo, you witness, YouWitness