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CBS launches citizen journalism upload site

Posted: 15/04/08 By: Oliver Luft
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CBS has quietly launched a citizen journalism website where members of the public can upload video and still images of newsworthy events from their mobile phones.

The launch of Cbseyemobile.com follows the launch of similar sites by other US TV networks to glean photos and video from members of the public to use in their news programmes.

CNN soft-launched its own citizen journalism upload site iReport 18-months ago.

It has since been forced to expand the site to accommodate the high volume of material that is being submitted.

The CBS mobile site was soft-launched last week without any promotion or senior staff talking about their aspirations for their new development.

It's expected that the 'sell' to the public will come once the site has been up and running for a few weeks.

The launch site has limited the social features, allowing users to just leave comments and ranking stories according to number of views.

In comparison, iReport seems to be the more slick social news operation with its tag clouds, its ability to rate and rank content, related news features, comments and its enabling of content sharing by offering code to embed videos in third-party sites and blogs. However, the functionality of the iReport launch site wasn't close to its present level.

It's likely that CBS could be planning the introduction of a greater range of user-focused elements once the site is established.

American users can upload to Cbseyemobile.com from their phones by sending an MMS to the US short code '85888' or by email.

Several UK news publishers - most notably the News of the World and The Sun newspapers - have been promoting short codes, to great success, in print and online as a quick and easy way for readers to send them content.

However, reports suggest that only uploads made through mobile provider Verizon are currently working.

CBS is looking primarily for images of breaking news, weather, sports and politics from the public on the site and is already populating it with some of its own content to encourage further uploads.

The site gives few details about how content will be used by CBS across its network's news programmes. However, the terms of use are telling:

"You further agree that Company, its parent, subsidiaries, affiliates, and partners and the directors, officers, employees, licensees and other representatives of each of them will have the unfettered right throughout the universe, in perpetuity, without any credit or compensation to you, to use, reuse, modify, alter, display, archive, publish, sub-license, perform, reproduce, disclose, transmit, broadcast, post, sell, translate, create derivative works of, distribute and use for advertising, marketing, publicity and promotional purposes, any of Your Upload Information or portions of Your Upload Information."

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cbs | citizen journalism | mobile | usa | cnn | user generated content | tv |

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