Regular Folks, Shooting History

"We now have as close to an objective truth about an event as we've ever had in history," he said.

Newspapers and television networks actively urge readers and viewers to send in their pictures of newsworthy events to supplement the work of professional photographers. And Internet sites help distribute them widely -- sites such as YouTube and Flickr, where anyone can post their photos and video for public consumption, are wildly popular. After Michael Richards, a former star of the TV comedy show "Seinfeld," was recorded with a cellphone camera last month at a Los Angeles club insulting black hecklers with a tirade of racial slurs, more than 1.3 million people viewed the video on YouTube.

NowPublic, a year-old venture that calls itself a "participatory news network," posts news and images from its "citizen journalists" on its Web site; the site claims 31,000 reporters in 130 countries, tapping into what it calls "the wisdom of crowds." The Reuters news agency and Yahoo recently joined forces to start You Witness News, which showcases amateur photos and video on the Yahoo news Web site.

'So Much Better'

Kyle MacRae, who runs Scoopt out of a converted bedroom in his small Glasgow home, was giving his two young sons a bath when his phone rang minutes after the Manhattan crash. It was Collins calling from New York. There was a plane down. He had photos. MacRae told him to e-mail them immediately.

MacRae said reports out of New York were confusing. Was it another 9/11 unfolding, or just an accident?

Whatever it was, MacRae looked at the e-mailed images arriving on his computer and knew that Collins had photos he could sell.

MacRae, 43, a former journalist and author of a dozen books on technology, started Scoopt with his wife, Jill, after the July 2005 transit system bombings in London. Many of the most memorable images from the subway tunnels were made by commuters with camera phones.

In 15 months, Scoopt has registered almost 12,000 people in 97 countries. U.S.-based Cell Journalist and Spy Media and several other agencies that deal exclusively in celebrity photos are providing similar services.

Verifying photos' authenticity is always a concern. MacRae said he quizzes photographers about their shots to make sure they are what they seem to be. MacRae said he caught one faker who said he got a shot of Mary-Kate Olsen while hiding behind thick hedges -- on a busy Manhattan street. Pressed by MacRae, the person admitted he had lifted the photo from the Internet and tried to pass it off as his own.

Many news agencies are leery of unsolicited photos that could have been altered or staged. Gillmor said one famous hoax purported to show a tourist posing at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, with a jetliner in the background about to smash into the tower. He said he recently rejected a photo that purported to show Cuban leader Fidel Castro dead in a coffin.

When Collins's photos arrived in Glasgow, MacRae called him back. Collins said that he could see photographers scrambling across rooftops and on the ground trying to get a good angle but that none had his vantage point. Within minutes, MacRae put the photos out on Internet-based distribution services monitored by photo editors at all major British newspapers. Almost immediately, the Sun newspaper in London and the Herald in Glasgow called to buy a photo.

In their London newsroom, editors at the Times had just chosen an image from the Associated Press for the early editions of the paper when the Scoopt photo appeared on their computer screens.

"The images from the AP were good, but this one was just so much better," said Paul Sanders, picture editor at the Times.

Privacy Concerns

Sitting in the Scoopt office, surrounded by books and spare computer modems and cables, MacRae welcomed his boys home from grade school one recent afternoon while neighbors bantered loudly on the rainy street below. Snoop Dogg, the American rapper, stared back at MacRae from his computer screen.

At Heathrow Airport last April, members of Snoop Dogg's 30-member entourage got into a brawl with police, apparently triggered when British Airways barred from its first-class lounge some members of the rapper's party who were flying economy class.

Within a couple of hours of the dust-up, MacRae had received five cellphone photos of Snoop Dogg browsing through the duty-free shop just before fists started flying. Because police quickly sealed off the area where the brawl happened, they were the only photos of him from the scene. Ten minutes after the pictures came in, MacRae sent them out to his list of publications interested in celebrity news.

"The phones started ringing right away," he said, and the next day the images appeared in Newsday and the New York Daily News, and later in Rolling Stone and magazines and newspapers in Britain.

With so many camera phones making celebrity photos so easy to come by, MacRae said, he is trying to get the balance right between newsworthiness and privacy.

"We're stuck in the middle trying to find a sensible approach," he said. "But I do know that you can't turn this off. Sooner or later, every news story will be captured first by a citizen journalist."