Yahoo and Reuters will seize the armies of cameraphone and PDA-toting citizenry in a new user-generated news program, the New York Times reports.The initiative kicked off Tuesday at Reuters.com and at Yahoo’s YouWitnessNews.Yahoo will carry the user-gen material on its news pages, and Reuters will go a step further, distributing the content over its wire to newspapers, magazines, and Web sites. The Times reports: “The project is among the most ambitious efforts in what has become known as citizen journalism, attempts by bloggers, start-up local news sites and by global news organizations like CNN and the BBC to see if readers can also become reporters.”“There is an ongoing demand for interesting and iconic images,” said Chris Ahearn, the president of the Reuters media group. He said the agency had always bought newsworthy pictures from individuals and part-time contributors known as stringers.“This is looking out and saying, ‘What if everybody in the world were my stringers?’ ” Mr. Ahearn said. Michael Richards, the actor who played Kramer on “Seinfeld,” was recorded last month responding to hecklers in a nightclub with racially charged epithets, The Times reports.Lloyd Braun (Seinfeld likeness noted), who runs Yahoo’s media group, said: “People don’t say, ‘I want to see user-generated content.’They want to see Michael Richards in the club. If that happens to be from a cellphone, they are happy with a cellphone. If it’s from a professional photographer, they are happy for that, too.” That was certainly the case in the Asian Tsunami. The global pictures editor at Reuters, Tom Szlukovenyi, told me when I was a reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald that pressure was coming from everywhere to have images at the ready. He said “near real-time photography” had become possible since his agency moved into the digital era in 1998.The Herald’s cover photograph, two days after the Boxing Day tsunami, of a man swept away in Phuket had been downloaded from a Web site where an artist had posted it.TV News is always on the hunt for moment-of video and pics now. Australia’s Channel Seven was one of the first crews to land at Phuket after the Boxing Day tsunami. The crew found home video the next morning that became the first and “most widely syndicated” footage of the disaster, according to the deputy news director, Tony Ritchie. So, is this good for news and journalism or just a way to get free content?From my Jan 8, 2005, report for the Sydney Morning Herald, with The New York Times:Siva Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University – and a blogger – said personal reporting made blogs compelling and therefore essential reading. “Right after BBC, I went to blogs,” he told The New York Times. Xeni Jardin, an editor at the Weblog boingboing.net, said bloggers at the scene were more deeply affected by events than journalists who roam from one disaster to another. “They are helping us understand the impact of this event in a way that other media just can’t,” she told The Times.Mr. Vaidhyanathan said: “This notion that we now have eyes and ears around the world is more than something we’ve grown accustomed to; we’ve grown to demand it.”Talk back to us, below. Technology Industry