Lou Ferrara is deputy managing editor for new media at The Associated Press.

CITIZEN IMAGES FROM MAJOR NEWS events are no longer a possibility. They are an expectation.

Soon after Seung-Hui Cho’s rampage through Virginia Tech left 33 dead, reporters and editors began asking citizens for video and images.

Within The Associated Press, there was surprise that there weren’t more citizen images for such a major news event — two years after the iconic subway image from the London bombings made it clear that citizen journalism was now an essential part of newsgathering.

Instead, in the hours after the Virginia Tech shootings, there were few images from citizens. The one notable video — showing a campus building as shots were fired inside — was snatched up by CNN quickly. Only days later did we realize that the citizen journalist was Cho, who recorded himself and his thoughts and shipped off the multimedia package to NBC.

By contrast, the Minnesota bridge collapse demonstrated how citizen journalism can, at times, be plentiful and help tell the story. In all, the AP acquired 89 citizen images of the bridge collapse and 16 minutes of video.

The AP has always been in the citizen journalism game, acquiring iconic images from the Sept. 11 attacks, Oklahoma City, the Concorde explosion and the 2005 tsunami, among other news events.

But the bridge collapse provided the most citizen journalism thus far, showing that ubiquitous phone cameras will actually yield content important to news organizations. Though the citizen contributions were only a fraction of the AP’s overall report in video and photos in Minnesota, they provided details, angles and images we wouldn’t have otherwise had.

We were able to get all of the images because over the past year we took three steps to enable the AP to react better and acquire more citizen journalism when news breaks.

• Six months ago, we began partnering with NowPublic.com, a citizen journalism Web site. Our editors communicate with NowPublic’s editors daily about news that may yield citizen images and are in constant contact during major breaking news. In addition to the bridge collapse, NowPublic has yielded images from tornadoes in the Midwest and a cyclone in Oman.
• We also began assigning an editor or two for each major breaking story to scour the Internet for other citizen journalism — on blogs, other sites and everywhere in between. In addition, this has become a place for finding witnesses and sources, as The Washington Post learned during its coverage of Virginia Tech.
• We told reporters and editors in the field that they need to ask for citizen images and video at every news event. You never know what you’ll get unless you ask.

The efforts yielded different levels of content in Minnesota:

• Two photos came via NowPublic.com. Three came from reporters and photographers working the scene as did a 15-minute video that was widely used.
• Fifteen photos came from a man who walked into the Minneapolis-St. Paul bureau and three more came from people staffers knew from their personal lives or past reporting experiences.
• But a whopping 66 images came from staffers looking online for images.

So what does this mean for newsrooms? Be ready.

Citizen journalism isn’t going to just flow into your operations. Some of it will trickle in if you make the effort to establish relationships online. But much of it will likely come the old-fashioned way: seeking it out and going after it.

In addition, don’t expect that it is all going to come within moments of the event. Some of it will. The AP found that a full day after the bridge collapse, content was still coming in.

Our suspicion is that while many people shot images the night of the collapse, they didn’t get in front of their computers for hours to upload the material.

It should also be noted that different news events will yield different levels of citizen contributions. A hurricane or a bridge collapsing in the middle of town means many people can safely shoot images. By comparison, a man shooting up a closed-door classroom — while a big story — may not yield as many images.

Even though the citizen journalism landscape is still taking shape, you should expect that with every major event some camera somewhere will capture the news.

Is your newsroom ready?*