The article leads with an America lawyer who killed herself by jumping from the fifth floor of a Kensington (London) hotel who was photographed by a bystander with a camera phone.
The writer, Jim White, says, "There would have been a time when none outside her immediate circle of grieving friends and family would have known about it, and her suicide would have remained an act of private desperation.
"But not these days. Several newspapers decided to report the woman's end prominently, as if it were a question of national importance."
Questionable photos
A London evening newspaper ran a photo on the front page of her on the hotel ledge and photos inside the paper of her falling through the air. Some readers were upset with the photos, and the Samaritans, a group that helps talk people out of "self harm," filed a formal complaint with the Press Complaints Commission.
[Here's a BBC News article about those complaints.]
Why did the the paper run the photos? "It was because they were there," White says. Before cellular phones, newspapers typically wouldn't get these type of photos except through a rare coincidence of a professional or amateur photographer passing by.
"But, in 2006, we are all snappers. And we all have the wherewithal to take clean, printable pictures with our mobiles, then send them instantaneously to a news organisation," the article notes.
Moral questions
The bystander who took the photos "snapped away and dispatched his exclusive in significantly less time
than it would have taken to write out the cheque in reward for his
endeavours."
The photos and videos taken by camera phone users during the London terrorist bombings in July 2005 changed the relationship between the public and the press, White says. "Eye-witness accounts became all the more dramatic when backed up with moving images and stills taken long before cameramen could be scrambled to the locations," he notes.
The news media began to develop policies for handling submissions from non-journalists.
Need to record
The explosion of camera phones has produced "an incessant urge to record." People are looking at the world through viewfinders rather than directly viewing a child's play, concerts or a football match, White says.
He concludes, "The one trouble is that, when we come eventually to study the footage
of us at work, rest and play, we will discover that all we were ever
doing was holding up a camera phone and recording each other."
I can empathize
As a camera phone fan, a wireless data consultant and amateur photographer with a graduate degree in broadcasting, I can empathize with journalists, citizen journalists and those who are upset by the use of camera phones.
The media has always published and broadcast photos and videos that are questionable to some people. When the New York Twin Towers were on fire on September 11, 2001, people jumped from the buildings.
At the time, the news media didn't show those photos and videos. But eventually they got out and you can find them. Camera phones aren't changing the behavior of the media as much as they are increasing the opportunities.
Through a viewfinder
I am one of those people who all too often view the world through a viewfinder, whether it's a film or digital camera or camera phone. (I also am one of those people who are in danger of smashing into trees or being run over by cars as I stare at my cellular phone screen as I'm walking.)
Are we getting more immune to horrific images as we see more of them. I don't think there's any question about that. Will we see more horrific images as the result of hundreds of millions of people who have camera phones? Without question.
But we also will see many more wonderful photos of the world. And we will see photos that will save lives and document horrors that need documenting.
Camera phones affect us all, not just the players in the wireless business. We need to ponder the effects of camera phones around the world, and that's a major reason I started this weblog.
[I checked the Web sites of The Times, The Sun and The Evening Standard that, I believe, published photos of the lawyer. All the papers had the story and some photos, but none of the "incriminating" photos were posted. Here's an article by The Times about why it published the photos.]
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