by Melissa Slager

Created on: July 31, 2009   Last Updated: August 01, 2009

Flickr is to collaborative photojournalism as blogs are to citizen journalism. The online tool that hosts, organizes and ranks millions of photos from photographers around the world all but invented the method of combining forces to provide a comprehensive view of what's happening in the world around us.

No paycheck required.

Major newspapers such as The New York Times and Washington Post have published images from Flickr in print and online editions

Z6EFP. A New York Times Magazine contributor turned to Flickr for an open source EW56Bhttp://www.flickr.com/groups/mlkblvd/ WH6PDproject documenting Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard stretches of pavement across the country. Even the White House is hip to Flickr.EW56Bhttp://www.wired.com/rawfile/2009/04/pre sidential-first-white-house-floods-flickr/WH6PDZ6EFP

Here's how Flickr works:

People armed with cameras take photographs - say, of the protests following the Iran election - then post them to their personal Flickr sites.

They tag the photos - to continue this example - with "iranelection."EW56Bhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/tags /iranelection/clusters/WH6PDZ6EFP

Photos are made publicly available under Creative Commons license.

Users also can contribute to pools, such as the Online News Association, Photojournalism, and Photojournalism 2.0 just to name a few.

Flickr ranks photos according to "interestingness," which takes into account such factors as page hits, tags used and "favorite" votes.

Users searching for photos of the global news event to use in their own way find a plethora to choose from.

More organizations are catching on. Traditional news media outlets are putting their own spin on the service, such as The Augusta Chronicle's Spotted community. And Google is stepping into the fray by adding a Creative Commons tool to its Images search engine.

Flickr isn't everything to everyone. Professional photojournalists looking to make money through the site may find it helpful, but not the panacea to a hyper-competitive market.

"I certainly would not say that Flickr is a waste of time, but I would say that like all marketing efforts it is only as good as the effort one puts in," professional photojournalist Pete Jenkins told Journalism.co.uk. "Flickr is not the great new hope that so many say it is, but at the same time there is no question that Flickr can be a useful part of any editorial photographer's marketing strategy."

But with an abundance of free material available from talented amateurs, the success of the site has prompted some to wonder whether the news industry even needs paid staff photojournalistsEW56Bhttp://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2 007/03/photojournalists-will-survive-in-era-of-citiz en-photogs064.htmlWH6PDZ6EFP anymore. The consensus was yes - but they'll have to do more and work harder than before.

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