Armed with cameraphones and digital cameras, survivors and onlookers of last Julys London bombing flooded the Internet with the first haunting glimpses of the aftermath long before professional photo-journalists descended on the scene.

Now, a small handful of new Internet businesses aim to get citizen shutterbugs paid for their wares, much of which were eventually splashed across newspaper and Web front pages worldwide.

There were no avenues into the mainstream media for amateurs as members of the public, said Kyle MacRae, who founded Scotland-based Scoopt weeks after the bombing. Its simply wrong. Its unjust.

Scoopt, a Web-based service that markets user-contributed photos to media organizations on its site (www.scoopt.com), was launched in August with little fanfare to fill the void.

Less than two months later, MacRae is now joined by two new companies in the United States aiming to profit from the natural inclination of regular citizens to document their surroundings.

There is a simple explanation here…some smart thinking individuals have seen a gap in the market and have taken the opportunity to capatilise on it…read more at: reuters