Have Drone,Will Broadcast

Armchair and random speculation on drones and citizen journalism.

“Sci-fi Reporter, something I tried out a while back. She is a front line reporter who bring news first hand to the public. Her job is not to fight, but rather hide and take note of the situation.” — Ben Lo, Artist, describing the above image.

It was while reading about the Hexo+ drone that I started to think we’ll soon see journalists setting out into the field with a camera-equipped drone in tow. Or a swarm of such drones, each carrying a video camera and programmed to follow the reporter at a different distance and taking a different flight path.

“No one to hold the camera? Not a problem. Hexo+ autonomously tracks you and makes sure you’re in the shot.” — Hexo+ Website

A reporter — likely already wearing a head-mounted GoPro camera — armed with a camera-carrying drone is ready to capture and report on any news that breaks. Imagine a reporter in a protest or riot, a swarm of five or six drones overhead, scuffles and screams all captured from multiple angles as the story is told to an unseen audience.

Of course, this is still science-fiction. Small consumer drones don’t have a strong enough battery to make real sense in the field, and the FAA guidelines covering drone use in journalism limit some of the more exciting possibilities like flying over crowds or even flying in a city.

“ . . . you’re not going to be flying over crowds at protests. It’s a massive safety issue. Imagine flying over a protest in Ferguson: What if your battery dies suddenly? You crash, you hurt someone (or worse).” — NeimanLab, New rules governing drone journalism are on the way — and there’s reason to be optimistic

There are very likely some citizen journalists out there, YouTube channel at the ready, who are willing to ignore those FAA guidelines and turn the eighties-styled cyberpunk future of Gibson and Williams into the cyberpunk present . . . once those pesky battery problems are solved.

Fortunately, the battery problem goes away entirely when we accept that science-fiction is only a decade or so away from reality.

And it may be even sooner than that.

Watch Eric Giler’s TED Talk for an example of wireless electricity in action. How soon will this technology find its way to drones?

Imagine our citizen journalist, in the next decade or so, equipped with a swarm of Hexo+ drones and a van that’s carrying a portable generator and a wireless electricity transmitter. The transmitter will need to be radiative, transmitting power across a distance, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that our citizen journalist will have access to such technology in the near future. Likely not within the next five years or decade, but maybe not much beyond that time.

If all of this sounds tough to think of as real then just remember: How close are we to self-driving cars and robots that can learn?

The Cyberpunk roleplaying game of the eighties and nineties. Idle entertainment as a child, an inspiration for today’s citizen journalists and modern cyberpunks. Just don’t expect to find yourself surgically altered with neural implants . . . yet.

“We are all children of the media from the day we are born. It shapes our lives in recreation, advertising, business and academia, through radio, video, print, billboard and the Net.” — Rockerboy, a sourcebook for Cyberpunk (1989).

Citizen journalism is here. Looking at Hexo+ makes me think it’s only going to get more exciting very soon.

Now citizen reporters are certainly using drones today for journalism — the website dronejournalism.org is focused entirely on using drones in reporting — but I believe it’s going to be the ability for a drone to follow a reporter, a self-made internet personality with a YouTube channel and a willingness to get into the action, that’s going to be the real game changer when it comes to direct-to-audience reporting.

When we look at how many YouTube personalities are attracting sizeable audiences, and combine that with the difficulty of making money through online video, then it makes sense that any tool that cuts costs will be embraced by those same personalities. Why spend money paying your friends to film you on the streets when drones can handle the job?

Will we see reporters, either affiliated with an agency or self-styled citizen journalists, use these drones to set off into the world without a camera crew? I think yes, but it’s possible that I only think yes because the mental image of a reporter surrounded by five or six drones strikes me as an awesome visual.

At the very least, the idea makes for a fantastic story seed.