My plan was to video the Silver Bells in the City celebration in downtown Lansing last Friday. But our WordPress Hybrid News theme also requires still images for all posts (for the slider and a thumbnail for excerpts). Since I didn’t want to carry a still camera as well as my video gear, I asked my photographer friend Casey if she could shoot a few stills for me, since I knew she was going. If for some reason, she couldn’t do so, I figured I would grab a still or two from the great video I expected to shoot of the Electric Light Parade, the governor lighting the tree and the fireworks.

But uh-oh – I had no idea how big the crowd would be. I realized to my horror that I would never be able to elbow my way to a spot to shoot the parade or anything else.

I ended up with a totally different kind of video (see below). But now I really really needed a good photo of the event. When I cellphoned Casey, she confessed that she had dashed out without her camera.

Fortunately for me, Casey is a loyal friend and devoted Flickr fan. Within hours, people were posting images of the event on Flickr, and Casey used the right search terms to find two exceptional photographers with great images – Dan Peters and his sister Shirl Peters. Casey emailed them to ask if we could post their pictures on the Lansing Online News story about the event, and they graciously allowed us to do so.

Lessons learned?

• Amateur? Professional? What do those terms mean today? – Dan and Shirl Peters prove that there are citizen photographers whose work rivals that of the top professionals. Indeed, because it is their passion and not just another assignment, that folks like Dan and Shirl often outdo the paid professionals. The challenge in the past has been to find them.
• Social networking pays off again – Sites like Flickr and Photo Bucket and others are invaluable in connecting citizen editors to citizen photographers in real time. A check back later also allowed me to learn that Dan had rescued a lost boy that same night. So now I can go back and add that to our story.
• Formal and informal rewards – Lansing Online News still remains a true citizen effort. No ads. No income. A labor of love. In some ways that makes it easier to ask folks like Dan and Shirl to contribute for free. But we hope to develop the Digi-Dollars ad barter idea so we could at least gift them a meal at an area restaurant for their contributions. How would it change the dynamic if some of us drew a salary and then asked others to contribute for free? I know already that the tensions at places such as AnnArbor.com are growing, at least among the paid and unpaid bloggers. Michigan State University Professor Dr. Stephen Lacy, one of this country’s top media researchers, told me a few weeks ago that money issues will inevitably arise in citizen journalism, and we will have a lot to learn about how and why.