December 14, 2006 – To help promote trust in citizen journalism, news agency Reuters, manufacturer Canon, and software developer Adobe are now working on developing a system to authenticate digital images, according to Reuters CEO Tom Glocer in his blog posting on Monday.
CEO Glocer stated in the Globes Media Conference in Tel Aviv this week that Reuters, Canon, and Adobe were collaborating to create a system that would allow editors to view changes made to digital images. Glocer did not announce specific details about the collaboration or availability of this technology.
This announcement comes after a series of Reuters issues raised regarding public trust in the media. Reuters recently partnered with Yahoo, parent company of Flickr, to encourage “amateur photographers” to submit photos to the news agency, essentially turning user content into news content.
However, the new amateur photography, as Glocer calls it, runs the risk of being doctored and portrayed as actual events, "amid all the noise, all the amateur pictures and editorial, the victim could be the truth and fact-based journalism,” stated Glocer.
In August, Reuters terminated the employment of freelancer Adnan Hajj after discovering he had digitally manipulated an image of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict through Photoshop. The photo manipulation brought to light an existing problem with digital images, with readers asking themselves what can they trust to be true.
The developing authentication system would thereby create a technical solution for “full transparency,” as Glocer stated, and set a standard for all news editors.
Interested readers can find Tom Glocer’s blog available at http://tomglocer.com/.
