An Englishman in Bangkok
Posted September 25th, 2006 at 5:30 am by Ezra Palmer, Yahoo! News
2 Comments / Filed in: Behind the Scenes, Trends & News
News of the coup in Thailand broke on Tuesday morning, and toward the end of the day I started looking around on Flickr to see if people in Bangkok were uploading anything interesting. It was so soon after the coup that very few images were available. Still, they were interesting, and I thought I might have a chance to build a small slideshow of some sort. I sent notes via Flickr mail to the photographers asking if they would be willing to have their photos included in a special feature on Yahoo! News, and if they might be interested in being interviewed.
By 7 the next morning there were still relatively few images posted, but those few pictures were really fascinating — pictures of people posing beside tanks, soldiers with flowers… totally unexpected stuff in the context of a military takeover.
By mid-morning, half a dozen Flickr users had responded to my queries. I really struck pay dirt with a guy named Dan Caspersz. A transplanted Englishman working for the United Nations, he was literate and observant, and like me he was struck by the incongruity of the festive atmosphere amidst a coup d’etat. We recorded a five-minute telephone interview on a conference bridge, which spit out a .wav file. Multimedia producer Chris Strimbu and I then boiled the interview down to 90 seconds, Chris illustrated it with our small library of Flickr images.
We posted the feature on Wednesday afternoon, with news still breaking in Bangkok. Very cool!
This isn’t the first time we’ve used Flickr images in news, but it’s the most ambitious effort so far. More to come…
Ezra Palmer
Managing Editor, Yahoo! News
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2 Comments Add your own
Alan Leff | September 25th, 2006 at 5:37 pm
Well, another Bay Area company succumbs to India.
Funny, you don’t have anything on your site, about the 10k people you are going to let go…so you can take the jobs to India!
People really need to see what you really are! Money hungry jerks that don’t give a damn about the people that have made you what you are!
You should be ashamed!
Nicki Dugan | September 25th, 2006 at 9:38 pm
Thanks for the comment, Alan, but I think you might be confused. Ezra’s post is about the military coup d’état in Bangkok, Thailand.
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