Media law and ethics » photography

Unmanned aerial journalism: how drones could be the industry’s next big thing

jtownend — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 08:31:34 +0000

Parrot AR. Drone [Source: Wikipedia]

Some specialists would prefer that we called drones by their official name, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. However, UAV journalism doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as ‘drone journalism’, which according to participants at a seminar in Oxford this week [22 October] could be the industry’s next major technical development.

This is drone journalism in action: a piece on Nebraska’s drought produced by the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications.

UAVs fitted with cameras may be “unmanned” on the aircraft itself, but they will need considerable human resourcing, with a capable pilot on the ground, and additional support.

The potential uses for UAVs fitted with cameras are wide-ranging: for sports reporting, crisis and event coverage, environmental reports, for scoping dangerous areas …

With all those opportunities also come various big questions: how will widespread and mainstream use of UAVs for journalism be controlled and regulated? How should news organisations treat third-party content? What are the associated privacy and data protection issues?

The event at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism brought together specialists from the UAV industry, representatives from a number of news organisations, media lawyers, academics and aviation regulators to discuss these and other questions.

A report from the Reuters Institute will follow in due course. For further information, please contact: Professor Robert Picard, Dr Daniel Bennett or Dr David Goldberg.

Further reading:

Digital forensics

jtownend — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 12:57:18 +0000

I recently looked into the fascinating field of digital forensics for the re-launched Insite blog (Colin Meek’s internet research skills/resources site).

Specialists such as Professor Hany Farid and Professor Anthony TS Ho are honing techniques to analyse and detect digital manipulation of photographs.

It struck me that these methods would be very relevant for media regulation systems and legal cases (and in the newsroom, if less specialised techniques were developed).

Does anyone know of any examples where photo forensic techniques have been used like this?

Photographers debate rights with police – on a blog

jtownend — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:16:22 +0000

Photojournalist Marc Vallée has a story about Sussex police seizing a protester’s footage at an anti-facist protest (photographs here).

On his blog, Vallée reports:

The film cassette was seized by police on the street under Section 19 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 on Monday 30 August 2010 Brighton, England.

The police spokesman says that the officer took the film because:

The officer reasonably believed the tape contained evidence of a protester being assaulted by someone taking part in the march. It has been seized temporarily to ensure that evidence cannot be inadvertently lost or altered and will be returned, intact, to the owner as soon as possible.

But the incident wasn’t reported in the mainstream media. The Sussex Police head of media relations, Nick Cloke, who answers the photographers’ questions on Vallée’s blog, says that the Guardian was initially interested:

It’s also worth mentioning that after discussion with The Guardian they agreed that while the issues around Sections 19 and 23 merit debate – indeed, I have significant personal and professional interest in this myself – basing a story around this incident would not have been proportionate, hence they decided not to run it.

But the person whose footage it was, Glenn Williams, disputes that he was near the suspected GBH incident the police media officer describes.

Rights and wrongs of the issue aside, it’s fascinating to see the media officer jump into the debate, at such length.

Cloke offers this, for example, in reply to Williams:

Before explaining what I know about the alleged assaults and how I collated this information, it concerns me that you were given unlawful direction to stop filming in your initial encounter with the officer. This should not have happened and I will be following it up with the officer and their supervisor. The officer has been identified from the collar number in the pictures, but as I haven’t yet had a chance to address this, it seems unfair to name him now, particularly as naming will not impact on either your or my comments.

And gives these examples of where the police got it wrong on previous occasions (Cloke gives further detail in a subsequent comment):

Indeed, since I took up my post in November 2009, there’ve been two times when material was inappropriately temporarily seized from media by Sussex officers. In both cases, unreserved apologies were given, the officers involved were given management advice and since then we’ve started a training programme to make everyone more aware of the rights people have to record in public places.

In the past, I’ve put in quite a few calls to the police over photography incidents like these, and never received a response like this.

As we scrutinise the relationship between police, police media officers and journalists (an issue that is addressed in the New York Times’ phone hacking report), online contributions like these should be welcomed, and where necessary, their content challenged.