News Pix n Flix is another new US based, Citizen Journalist site, aimed at getting ordinary people witnessing news, to send in their photos of the event - probably taken with their ever-present camera and video phones.

As I’ve noted before, capturing live news is increasingly more likely to be done by passing ordinary citizens, than professional photographers, who can’t possibly be everywhere at once. But with camera phones increasingly ubiquitous, it’s more and more likely that any news events will be seen by people nearby, suitably equipped to capture it for posterity and the news organisations.

The UK has already seen the launch of Scoopt, which Carlo updated us on last week - despite having 1,200 registered users, there have been no photos sent in of the right quality so far. Early days, but it does illustrate the problem of scaling this that I wrote about in my original post. You need millions of people on board to guarantee of capturing anything interesting.

The main difference between Scoopt and News Pix n Flix (apart from Scoopt having the better name)  seems to be in the way they reward the Citizen Journalists. Scoopt opts for a revenue share, which seems a pretty fair way of approaching it. After all, if they do their job properly, they should be able to turn a news-worthy image into lots of money in a way that the normal folk, without the right contacts, wouldn’t be able to do.

News Pix n Flix, however, pays out "up to $50" if "your submission is chosen and used in the news".  This seems a little, well…mean actually. A hot news photo can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and people surely realise this.

The other issue that both services have is that, as shown in the London bombings, many witnesses seemed more than happy to send in their pictures and video for free to newspapers and the media. I think that this was something to do with wanting to share the trauma they’d experienced with the world, rather than thinking "Hang on, I may have just got blown up and witnessed my fellow humans dying, but this could be a nice little earner, if I play my cards right."

I have no doubt that we’ll see more and more examples of photographs from ordinary people in the media. But time will tell if they’ll learn to go via agencies like these.

As for the agencies themselves, here’s a new buzzword for you - YASRO. Yet Another Scoopt Rip Off. You read it here first.