Drones as journalism tools

Unmanned aerial vehicles, better known as drones, have made their way out of military laboratories and into local electronics shops during the past ten years. Today, anybody can buy their own drone for as little as 300 euros. And the unmanned craft can even be used by journalists, for example, to cover protests or catastrophes.

Marcus Bösch talks about the pros and cons of drone journalism.

 “We’re entering the Drone Age,” pronounced Chris Anderson, former editor-in-chief of the US technology magazine “Wired”, in June 2012.

Anderson wasn’t referring to male bees, of course, but rather unmanned aerial vehicles. Since September 11, 2001, the boom in the use of drones hasn’t been limited to just the military – police forces, fire departments, scientists, companies, architects and private users are diverse uses for drones.

The German Federal Police uses drones to monitor borders and railways while the multinational materials and technology company Thyssen checks gas pipelines with them. Scientists at the Humboldt University in Berlin are testing drones as a way to potentially cut back on the use of pesticides and fertilizers in agriculture.

NASA researches hurricanes with GlobalHawk drones, the environmental group Sea Shepherd hunts down whalers with drones, a Swiss television station uses drones to film downhill ski races and an Austrian private photographer sells photos of Vienna taken by a drone.

Welcome to the Drone Age

Drone technology is widely available and is also cheap; a basic model such as the AR.Drone costs just over 300 euros.

The AR.Drone, which can fly for about 10 to 12 minutes at a time, differs from a remote-controlled helicopter in several small but significant ways. With its four rotors, the drone is quieter than a remote-controlled helicopter and it’s steered via a smartphone instead of with a remote.

The built-in camera can film in HD quality. The video (up until now the drone doesn’t record sound) can be downloaded onto USB stick or streamed directly to a smartphone where it can be edited using additional apps and uploaded.

Drone journalism?

 Matt Waite owns an AR.Drone 2. The journalism professor founded the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in November 2011.

Since then, the concept of ‘drone journalism’ has been receiving international attention. Meanwhile, people are taking notice of Waite’s proposition that unmanned aerial vehicles will become an integral part of journalism in the future.

Together with his colleagues, Waite wants to explore how unmanned aircraft can by used by journalists to their advantage. He’s being helped by the Knight Foundation, which has awarded the lab a grant of 37,000 Euro ($50,000).

Drones can take fantastic photos and videos from unusual angles which are cheap and quick to shoot in contrast to aerial photos taken from a helicopter. However, for Waite, drone journalism is much more than that.

Above all, he wants to experiment with using drones to collect and process data. For example, a drone fitted with the appropriate sensors could fly independently over a radioactive area and simultaneously compile a hazard map.

“Drones can give us more information and different perspectives of events. … In ten years time, they will be everywhere,” Waite said in an interview.

Considerable hurdles

As well as technical issues, there are also numerous legal and ethical questions about the use of drones which need to be answered. This means the current situation for budding drone journalists is still somewhat restrictive.

In June 2011, magazine editors from the now-defunct iPad newspaper “The Daily” flew a MicroDrone MD4-1000 over an area of Alabama which had been devastated by tornadoes and used the aerial pictures in their reporting.

The US aviation authority FAA launched an investigation into these drone flights on the grounds that “The Daily” was a commercial product; commercial use of drones has been banned under FAA regulations since 2007.

The film industry in the US has also been hesitant to encourage drone use. Since May 2011, for example, the California Film Commission has refused to issue permits to use drones to shoot footage over state property on the grounds that it is too risky. The law for hobby pilots isn’t as restrictive, however.

Changes on the horizon

Commercial drone pilots just have to be patient. In 2012, the US Congress cleared the way for the modernisation of the US airspace. With funding to the tune of 47.4 billion euro, the bill, among other things, orders the FAA to develop a plan for the use of a wide range of drones by September 2015. Experts believe the the sky will then be opened to all types of unmanned aerial aircraft – miliary, commercial and private.

In all likelihood, the bill will see changes to drone legislation in other countries.

The journalism community itself is also concerned with legal and ethical questions surrounding drone use. Matthew Schroyer, who alongside Waite is one of the leading experts in the drone journalism scene, has put up a Drone Journalism Code of Ethics on his website, dronejournalism.org.

A young man called Tim Pool is also demonstrating what the future of journalism could look like.

Pool became famous in English language media after he live streamed the November 2011 Occupy Wallstreet protests in New York using a smartphone and spare batteries. His 21-hour broadcast was used by NBC, Reuters and Al Jazeera, among others. The livestream viewers could follow the protests from Pool’s perspective and chat with Pool while he was broadcasting.

In a further step, Pool also used a A.R. Drone for his reporting. He modified the software so it was able to stream live videos from his ‘OccuCopter’ – and that using a smartphone and drone that cost around 1,000 euro.

Playing with all the possibilities of drone use, it isn’t improbably that Chris Anderson’s prediction of a Drone Age will become a reality. The US Magazine “Wired” estimates that in the United States alone, around 1,000 new hobby drones take off each month.

Marcus Bösch is a freelance journalist and trainer for the DW Akademie. Together with Lorenz Matzat, Bösch runs the the German language blog about drone journalism, drohnenjournalismus.de.

 Translation: Kate Hairsine