This morning one of our networks posted a story about how last weeks snow and ice storm has caused millions of dollars in damage to docks, marinas, and boats at the Lake of the Ozarks. A short time later, someone forwarded a link to a web page featuring photos of the damage. I called the guy that put the page up and got his permission to use one of the images (and linked our story to his page).

I only mention this because, starting tomorrow, users will be able to upload photos and videos to a section of Yahoo called You Witness News. All of the submissions will appear on Flickr or a similar site for video. Editors at both Reuters and Yahoo will review the submissions and select some to place on pages with relevant news articles, just as professional photographs and video clips are woven into their news sites today.

According to the story at NYTimes.com, users will not be paid for images displayed on the Yahoo and Reuters sites. But people whose photos or videos are selected for distribution to Reuters clients will receive a payment.

The piece goes on to say that Yahoo plans to use the images on its sports and entertainment sites. Over time, it wants to expand to local news and high school sports. And it will consider allowing users to contribute articles as well as images.

Now, before you tell me that the public won’t be smart enough or take the time to upload a photo or video… let me just say: YouTube.

Who might use the Yahoo/Reuters service? Well, we struggle to come up with photos for the stories our networks cover. We’re radio guys and we’re still figuring out how to get good images for our stories. And we haven’t touched video. If the Yahoo/Reuters service was easy and affordable, yeah… I’d be interested.

And here’s a question for radio station webmasters: If some of your listeners have great photos and video of last night’s local high school football game… and they’re willing (eager!) to share them with you… do you have the wherewithal to add them to your website? Or, better question… do YOU have anything about the big game on your site? Mark my words… someone will make a place for that very local content.

E-Mediat Tidbits: “It’s a perennial newsroom quandary: When a reporter has a hot story, should you break it online immediately or hold it for the press or airtime deadline?”

The anecdote related by an editor for the Nashua Telegraph suggests don’t hold the story:

“It is not TV or radio or other papers that are going to beat you — it is your readers. There are more of them, they know more than you, and they don’t have deadlines.”

I know that many of the people working in our newsrooms still can’t quite believe this could be true. And I can’t believe they can’t believe it (Can you belive it?). All those bloggers… all of those video-capable cell phones…

For the longest time there was this, “if-a-tree-falls-in-the-forrest” mindset. If the bank was robbed at 3:00 p.m. but none of the news media had reported it… it was like it hadn’t happened. It wasn’t real until we told you about.

From now on, when the tree falls…somebody blogged it.

I stumbled across this on one of the Wired blogs (Epicenter). Have you heard of Topix? It’s a news aggregator that uses a geolocating algorithm they’ve developed to get all the news relevant to any zip code or city from all of its 50,000 news sources. Punch in the coordinates for Jefferson City and you get all the stories out of all the local papers, without repeats, in one place.

You can also use Topix to search 5,500 public company and industry verticals, 48,000 celebrities and musicians, 1,500 sports teams and personalities. You used to have to pay big money to do a Lexis-Nexis search to get info like this or pay a clipping service like Burrelles. Now anyone can do it for free.

According to Epicenter (a Wired blog), Topix is backed by Tribune, Gannett and McClatchy. This is one of those things that’s hard to describe but kind of cool in practice. Check it out.