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