I was enthralled to see a reader submitted photo on the front page of The Lawrence Journal-World this morning. It was located just below the fold and part of a followup story about hail damage from the storm on Sunday.
Reader submitted photos rounded out the coverage done by our awesome staff of photographers. In fact, reader submitted photos and those taken by our readers appeared side by side in the same online gallery.
While this might make some people a little uneasy, I think it’s perfect. There’s no way that we could produce a paper with the quality that our readers expect without our photographers. At the same time our photographers can’t be everywhere at once and it’s great to be able to expand our coverage with the help of our readers.
My co-worker David reminds me that we’re also changing the photo credit that runs in print from “Special to the Journal-World” to “Submitted online by” which should help spread the world and generate more content online that might see its way to print.
It’s a two-way street and everybody wins. We’re better because our readers submit content to us and we’re able to provide better coverage to them because of it.