December 2011
19 posts
Crash report No. 1
In the spirit of being as open and transparent with my experiments with the drone, I’m going to write up major crashes like the National Transportation Safety Board writes up real crashes. — Matt Waite
Executive Summary:
At about 5:30 p.m. CST Dec. 28, 2011 during a test flight to gauge the effectiveness of a new camera mount, the drone operator lost control of the aircraft while it...
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Occupy Wall Street's 'occucopter': Who's watching... →
“The question is, do we really want the paranoiac nightmare of our airspace being polluted by police and personal drones with all of us watching our watchers?”
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Toward the crowdsourcing of an ethics of citizen... →
Interesting post, interesting comments: “There are complex concerns regarding the ethical use of drones, the most important being public safety. There are ways in which drones may become more hazardous than helpful to the public. The operators of these drones have to know what they are doing and no citizens should be harmed in the event of a crash landing or other loss of control. And...
BBC CoJo: Spy planes: the news industry's eyes in... →
The development of relatively low cost unmanned aircraft systems fitted with small high definition cameras is also beginning to generate interest in the news industry.
5 things you need to know about drone journalism →
The idea that a drone, or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), can become an eye-in-the-sky witness taking pictures or video of protests or other breaking news events is a timely one. There’s a lot going on, here’s what journalists need to know to get started.
WatchCNN’s coverage of the Russian protest drone.
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Noting reactions to drones for journalism
I’ll admit: I expected privacy concerns. I expected the “OMG the MEDIA has PREDATORS” tweets. And I expected people to ask if they could shoot down a drone over their property.
But I didn’t expect UFOs.
UFOs? UFOs.
For the record, and in case you don’t click the links, no, there weren’t UFO’s over a protest in Moscow. It was a drone mounted camera. You...
More on the Moscow protest photos
Check out this amazing image of protests in Moscow taken from a drone mounted Canon digital SLR.
Check out more here from Ridus.ru, a citizen journalism agency in Russia.
Now we’re starting to see the back story. You can read the whole post here, in Russian, from AirPano.ru, a Russian panoramic photo agency. What I can tell from a Google Translate — sorry, my Russian is a little...
Citizen journalists in Russia use drone mounted... →
The Google translate of the text isn’t so hot, but it does say they used an RC helicopter to get the images.
LAT: Local law enforcement using border patrol's... →
A Predator returning from a routine northern border patrol is diverted to help a North Dakota sheriff arrest members of the Sovereign Citizen Movement who had chased him off their property. Surveillance from two miles up, and a congresswoman who said this isn’t what they authorized.
NatGeo field testing drones →
“There’s no guarantee’s whatsoever that this will work,” photographer Michael “Nick” Nichols said.
The People's Drones →
Is a robot arms race upon us? And is a check on power open-source drones for the masses? Interesting questions.
Look, Up In The Sky! It's A Drone, Looking At You →
An NPR piece on civilian uses of drones drawing fire from some quarters. Again, read the comments if you want to see how a section of the audience is reacting to this idea. — Matt Waite
Q&A on Drone Journalism →
Ben Welsh, a developer at the LA Times and a friend, asked me some questions about the lab and put them on his personal blog. He asks about our plans, our funding and the reaction we got at the News Foo camp in Phoenix this weekend.
— Matt Waite
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What is drone journalism?
With the FAA set to open the nation’s airways to civilian unmanned aircraft, the potential uses for drones outside of the military are starting to open up. And that raises a question: Could you do journalism from a drone?
That’s a question we want to try and answer at the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications....
