A new demand for citizen journalism has come right on the heels of the user-generated video boom. Just yesterday, Reuters and Yahoo announced that anyone with a digital camera or a camera phone could submit pictures and video of news events, to be placed throughout Reuters.com and Yahoo News. Reuters said it would also start to distribute some of the submissions to the thousands of print, online and broadcast media outlets that subscribe to its news service. It also hopes to develop a site comprised completely of user-submitted photographs and video. "There is an ongoing demand …

The user-generated content movement (or at least the ethics of it) is making its way to the silver screen. A startup called InDplay, which is backed by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, seeks to be the middle ground between sites like YouTube and the select world of theater distribution. For the little-guy filmmakers, the traditional methods of licensing films are too expensive, exclusive and inefficient for almost everyone but major players. InDplay aims to solve that problem by being part eBay, part IMDb (the online movie database). It allows anyone who owns rights to video to register as …

You might be wondering why Google and YouTube can get away with rapid copyright infringement while other user-generated companies are getting cease-and-desist letters from major media and record companies. Sure, the money has a lot to do with it, but if you're a network, you simply can't ignore 23.5 million monthly unique visitors. No publicly traded media company can turn down (for example) $100 million, because that kind of money "far exceeds what any single broadcast network can extract from the online world." This is the Google/YouTube come-on: They want to buy time, but media companies …

In Britain, Web advertising continues to grow apace, roughly 40% annually, accounting for as much as 14% of overall ad spending in Britain--the highest level in the world, says the New York Times and about twice the level as here in the United States. Terry Semel, the chief executive of Yahoo, says that Britain is a good year or two ahead of the U.S. in online advertising. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau in Britain, Web ads have grown from 1.4% of ad spending in 2002 to 10.5% this year. By comparison, the IAB in the U.S. says American …

MySpace's growth may slowing, but it's still been a stellar 1.5 years for Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. The media conglomerate acquired MySpace parent Intermix Media for $580 million in the summer of 2005, followed by the $650 million acquisition of IGN and online movie site Rotten Tomatoes. Those savvy purchases gained the media giant some real clout with Generation Y and, it hopes, advertisers, too. Nowadays, Fox Interactive Media is beginning to repay the fee; the News Corp. Internet arm expects to generate $500 million sales for the fiscal year ending June 2007. Murdoch himself estimates the …

Digg, the community-voting site that is suppose to help the Web's best articles rise to the surface, is coming under fire as companies and communities of users with a vested interest in working together are trying to manipulate the site's rankings. It's similar to click fraud, but rather than using an automated program run by a sketchy third party, this kind is committed with the direct participation of users. Users say the manipulation is eroding Digg's credibility. The site's executives have owned up to the problem. "People are trying to basically take advantage of Digg by …

The future of cell phones is particularly fun to think about: Your phone will soon be your real-world remote control, capable of playing long and short-form video, video games, music, and now, financial transactions. You'd think phone carriers have been dreaming of the day when they can take a slice of transactions made with a cell phone. Forget the credit card. Swipe the phone, and that sweater is yours. In Japan and Europe, this is already a reality. Consumers have been buying stuff with their handsets for about a year. But in the U.S., we're going …

A few weeks ago, Jerry Maguire came out of closet at Yahoo--his name is really Brad Garlinghouse--to tell employees that the Web giant has spread itself too thin and is now a shadow of its former self. To get back on track, it will take cost-cuts and renewed focus, he said. Garlinghouse was right to sound the alarm, but wrong in his focus. Yahoo may be spread as thin but most businesses would kill to have Yahoo's broad diversity of content,commerce properties and worldwide brand recognition. The Web portal still ranks first on the Web in users and page …

It looks like News Corp. will get to bring MySpace to China after all. The media conglomerate is in the process of finalizing a deal with a Boston-based technology and former China Netcom Corp. CEO Edward Tian to create a MySpace China. With its domestic growth slowing, entrance into China would be huge for News Corp. and MySpace. With nearly 200 million Internet users, China represents one of the Web's largest markets and the fastest-growing. Still, there's no guarantee that Chinese Web users will take to MySpace. Regulating the site's content will be difficult, particularly as the company …

How do you put the "omni" in Omnimedia? Susan Lyne, the CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, says she expects the company to generate about one-third of its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization from its Internet business by 2010. "We are looking at publishing, merchandising and Internet each driving roughly a third of our EBITDA by 2010," Lyne said at a Reuters Media Summit in New York. That's interesting, given that the company most recently posted an adjusted loss of $600,000 in EBITDA on revenue of $2.8 million for its Web properties in the …