Knight News Challenge Funds Photography App
Posted: January 25, 2013
Amateur journalists may now have a leg up, one that many who came up before would have loved to have. Thanks to a grant from the Knight News Challenge, there's an app that lets budding journalists send photos to news outlets, and does it securely. The app adds some extra features, like embedded verification data. The potential uses of the app could make it a game changer when it comes to fair and honest reporting.
Amateur journalists may now have a leg up, one that many who came up before would have loved to have. Thanks to a grant from the Knight News Challenge, there's an app that lets budding journalists send photos to news outlets, and does it securely. The app adds some extra features, like embedded verification data. The potential uses of the app could make it a game changer when it comes to fair and honest reporting.
A mobile app that will help amateur journalists send photos to news organizations securely and with embedded verification data is among eight projects funded by the latest Knight News Challenge grants.
“Clearly the spread of citizen-generated, amateur-driven content is here to stay. But we still have not developed the mechanisms and tools for understanding that content, verifying that content, feeling comfortable about using that content,” Knight Foundation Director of Journalism and Media Innovation John Bracken told me.
The Knight-funded solution is an Android app called InformaCam — to be built by mobile security specialists at The Guardian Project and human rights advocates at Witness.
Witness, which was granted $320,000 by Knight, works with volunteers around the world who document evidence of abuse using smartphones. The organization realized it needed a better way of doing that — a photography app that would automatically embed metadata in photos to certify their accuracy, and transmit the photos securely to Witness or a designated news organization.
Secure transmission is especially important when the photographer is documenting something that authorities might want to suppress.
“That same data that helps the BBC confirm that this was filmed in a particular town in Syria by a particular person on a particular day, is of course the same information that can be valuable to a repressive government or someone who has worse intentions,” Witness program director Sam Gregory said in an interview.
In fact, Witness previously developed a photography app called Obscuracam that addressed that problem by stripping out all metadata and blurring human faces in images. But that also made the photos less useful. InformaCam will do the opposite — adding extra tamper-proof metadata from phone sensors, such as location, movement, even the outdoor temperature.
Read the entire article Knight News Challenge funds photography app with built-in verification data at Poynter.