Article Image

IPFS News Link • Media: Television

The Local News: Now Brought To You By Drones?

• http://www.popsci.com, By Clay Dillow
 

Over at the University of Nebraska, journalism students putting another tool in the reporter’s toolbox: drones. The Drone Journalism Lab at U. of Nebraska Lincoln has filed its first drone-assisted story, a print/video story package (you can see the video below) on the ongoing drought in Nebraska’s Platte River basin.

Collaborating with the university’s NIMBUS Lab (that’s Nebraska Intelligent MoBile Unmanned Systems), the journalism school used an unmanned aerial system (UAS) to gather imagery from along the Platte River and surrounding farmland to supplement their report--a pretty pedestrian, uncontroversial use of the technology. But while the idea of using drones for news collection isn’t necessarily new, the Drone Journalism Lab is the first program we know of at an accredited university to aggressively pursue this kind of data collection in the name of journalism using unmanned aerial systems.