shakran

I love the idea. Now here are the snags:

1) journalists generally aren't allowed to do reports outside of their job without permission from their news director / editor. You certainly are almost never allowed to use your company's gear for non-company business. So at the very least, you gotta go buy your own newsgathering stuff.

2) Gathering news is EXPENSIVE. I go through around $20 a day in gas alone. My camera costs a little over 50 thousand dollars - not counting the lens - that's $25,000 by itself. My tripod is a grand. My shotgun mic is $2,000 and my wireless lapel mic is $2,500. Various necessary accessories to all that gear totals around 3 grand. My scanners, at $500 a pop, cost $3500. Fortunately my station paid for most of that, because very few individuals could afford all that crap. Especially if they were buying it for a website that paid little to nothing. And I didn't even tally up the cost of long distance phone calls, video licensing, wire services, etc. Of course we'd need to add to that around a $5,000 computer to edit everything, and that's if I did it on the cheap. Oh, and then there's recording media, which is also much more expensive than the digital-8 or miniDV the amateurs shoot on.

The print guys could get away with a lower price tag, but a professional grade digital camera is gonna be around 5 grand, not counting the capture cards, batteries, flashes, and lenses (and professional quality lenses are INSANELY expensive), plus the gas, the wire services, etc etc etc.

The cheapest believe it or not would be audio-only. Grab a minidisc recorder and a decent mic and you'd be out the door for around 800-1000, again not counting gas, wire services, etc.



In short, reporting the news is not a cheap proposition. I think the website is a great idea but I'm not sure how people could afford to post to it unless they were insanely rich.