A Professional Society for Drone Journalists

Drone+Welcome+3.jpgBetween the founding of Nebraska's Drone Journalism lab and citizen journalists using drones to cover protests around the globe, the use of drones in journalism has exploded in the past several months. Together with Matt Waite, Pulitzer Prize winning developer of Politifact and the man behind the Drone Journalism Lab, Steve Doig, Pulitzer Prize winning data journalist and ASU journalism professor, and others, we've begun an organization to develop the ethical, educational and technological framework for drone journalism.

The future home of the Professional Society of Drone Journalists is Dronejournalism.org, but as of now, we just have a static image up. We'll have more as this idea develops.

It's been happening in Russia and Poland, and drone journalism is happening in pockets in America. To sum up our technical abilities at this point, we are experimenting with off-the-shelf Parrot AR Drones as a proof of concept. From there, as soon as funding materializes, we'll pursue ArduPilot and ArduCopter-based drones.

It's all very exciting. More to come.

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Comments

  • @Kevin

    Thank you for your comment. Injuring people is exactly the thing we're trying to avoid, which is why ethics and education are the core components of the group. If journalists have a resource early on, something that can set a standard for the safe,ethical and legal operation of drones, that can help prevent mishaps. We view drone journalism as a branch of civil drone use, but there are some special qualifications with drone journalism that necessitate a special professional grouping (given journalism ethics, privacy law, fourth estate privileges, first amendment law, etc).

  • You better not crash a drone on top of citizens, guys... at this point, any incident can hurt our hobby and development efforts.

    If security concerns are handled correctly though, I think drones offer a whole new way to do journalism, and journalism is a very good use of civilian drones!

  • T3

    Registering a domain does not and organization make....

  • Developer

    They might share ideas and experiences on what frames and camera mounts work. 

  • Why do we need drone journalists, wouldn't aviation journalists be good enough???

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