The idea similar to “The world from your perspective” of the BBC has already been put into practice by many other websites for some time. I am not sure which one was the first big news organization taking advantage of “citizen photojournalism”, but the BBC is certainly, thanks to their popularity and reputation, one of the most successful. They have good pictures from people all over the world. They even organize photo contests for their readers-contributors.
The BBC is definitely not the website where one should go to find the best pictures. Even with their most beautiful photos, they only keep a low resolution, maybe to make sure that readers from parts of the world with a low speed of the Internet can download them. But because those pictures are so rich in variety, the photo section gives the feeling that the “Beeb” is truly international.
My online newspaper once tried doing the same thing, asking Vietnamese-speaking people from all over the world to send photos of what they saw in their places to us, but it was a failure. Few people did, and those who did had poorly-shot photos. So we changed the tactic, asking people to send photos of themselves, their children, their friends, etc and let our readers vote for the best pictures. This time, it was a big success.
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