CBSeyemobile.com: Where no cute cat footage goes unposted
By Amy Lee
CBS last month quietly joined the ranks of seemingly countless local and national news sites to allow users to capture and post video and photos of events instantly onto its Web site. While hardly a novel idea, the launch of CBSeyemobile.com in mid-April is billed as a cyber site “where everyone reports,” and ostensibly is a way for CBS to try to broadcast footage captured via cell phone by eyewitnesses to breaking news events.
This approach makes sense, of course. No news-gathering organization can possibly anticipate every breaking news event on any given day, so having an army of volunteer citizen journalists on hand for such events, especially natural disasters or crime events, could be invaluable.
CBSeyemobile.com, however, has suffered from the lack of organization and purpose that befalls many such attempts to recruit citizen journalists. It’s chock full of videos that may be interesting or intriguing to some, but on the whole are not footage of actual news events.
It’s chock full of clips of cute pets, being, well, cute. It’s got some smash-em-up footage of stock car races and a bus being dismantled (on purpose and in an apparently planned action) in Iceland. In short, it’s a lot like YouTube.com, but very little like a branded news site.
Today’s posts thankfully included footage of citizen reports from the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination, but that is hardly “unique” footage CBS’s own reporters and producers could not have captured on their own. To CBS’s credit, perhaps the company felt the site was a way to test the waters to see the quality of the submissions and whether the effort is worthwhile. Regardless, the site is largely pointless and has almost zero interface with the company’s other, more mature and professionally-maintained news sites.
To me, this is one of those forays into new media that established news organizations should be careful about. Hosting a site such as this, where nearly all the content is submitted by anyone with a computer, could potentially water down its hard-fought brand name as a news organization. CBS, and others interested in hosting citizen-gathered information, should promote these sites as a way for the audience to participate in the news gathering of a news event, and stick to that genre.
Certainly CBS doesn’t need yet another Web site that hosts a library full of pet videos.
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