Photo uploads

The anti-war protest march held in Washington on September 24 involved an estimated 300,000 people and therefore 300,000 perspectives on the event.

In the past, newspapers put a few shots (or sometimes just one) that summarized the event for the many who could not attend. This, of course, introduced the biases of the photo editors, who were forced to summarize a massive event they often had not attended while working on tight deadlines.

Today, a paper such as the Washington Post starts with an online article which then contains links to a video and even a javascript link to a gallery of 20 photos.

While that is a wonderful way to give a greater variety of viewpoints, the Internet now allows EVERYONE to be a photojournalist. Sites that encourage photo uploads from cell phones and computers such as Flickr allow you to attach tags to your photos so that they can be searched. Photos also can be searched by "Most Recent" and "Most Interesting," which, in the case of the anti-war photos leads us to 30 pages of photos, 594 in all as of this writing).

What a wonderful way to make sure that a variety of viewpoints are seen and heard.