Amateurs get in on the paparazzi beat

HAMBURG, Germany--A few days before he planted his head into the chest of the Italian defender Marco Materazzi in the World Cup final, ensuring an inglorious end to a stellar soccer career, Zinédine Zidane stepped out onto the balcony of his Berlin hotel and had a cigarette.

From an office building nearby, someone whipped out a camera phone and took a picture. A couple of days later, the snapshot, in all its grainy sensation, was in the pages of Bild, the top-selling German tabloid.

The reader-reporter had struck again.

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Bild's Leser-Reporter, or reader-reporter feature, introduced during the World Cup, brought its audience daily photos of celebrities, politicians and soccer stars--taken from the cell phone cameras of quick-thinking passers-by and sent to the paper.

"Before, readers saw something in the street and called it in to the newspaper," said Christoph Simon, a Bild editor. "Times have changed."

The paper paid 500 to 1,000 euros for photos printed in the reader-reporter pages, and, by the end of the World Cup tournament, as many as 1,000 pictures were arriving daily.

Bild has decided to extend the venture and join a growing number of European publications that are taking advantage of cell phone technology to reach new levels of reader interactivity and, some say, invasion of privacy.

News organizations like CNN and The Guardian have been using reader-generated photos and video files since the Asian tsunami in December 2004. But the Norwegian tabloid VG and, recently, the regional Saarbrücker Zeitung in Germany were pioneers in mobilizing readers with regular reader-reporter sections. Bild and a Swiss tabloid, Blick, have followed--bringing millions of readers into the new age of "citizen journalism."