Yahoo’s upcoming You Witness News will allow user-generated photos and video to be uploaded to the service, to be used in news stories that will be posted on the site. Natali Del Conte’s post about this new service runs happily along until smashing headlong into a brick wall in the last sentence. She states that “As long as they’re just soliciting art and not writing, I’m okay with it.”

I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt, and assume that because she’s a writer, she wants to protect her little corner of the world, and let the photojournalists fend for themselves. To not stand up for other professionals, especially those so closely tied to syndicated/published writing, seems incredibly shortsighted to me. If the aim of You Witness News is to devalue well-constructed art, it can only be a matter of time before they will attempt to devalue well-constructed writing, and she will have then sold herself out.

We have said it time and time again on The Podcast Brothers that when negotiating the value of your content, you owe it to yourself and the podcasting/user-generated content community at large to make sure your content is not undervalued by those who would attempt to undervalue it in their own self interest. It seems Natali could use a bit more of this attitude, rather than throwing her photo-taking counterparts to the wolves.

At best, her attitude is selfish; at worst, it is a slap in the face to those who have an eye for “the shot”.