Interesting piece in New York's Photo District News about "crowdsourcing" of photos

The word "crowdsourcing" has come to mean audience and reader generated photos sent to newspapers and other media.

Photo District News, a N.Y. based photo magazine, headlined its interesting analysis of photos from the hurricane Sandy disaster "The failure of crowdsourcing news photos."

An excerpt:

"At a time of cost cutting for media budgets, lots of news organizations imagine that user-generated content can fill the void. But the recent failure of crowd-sourced news photos of Hurricane Sandy, and the shortage of coverage of other climate change-fueled disasters around the world, demonstrate how far we are from truly democratizing the medium of photography. Photographers worry that the lowering of technological barriers means “everyone’s a photographer now,” but in fact, the number of people who can take and share news photos is still limited by economics, infrastructure and geography."

The whole story