Student Blog Provides ‘Drone’s-Eye View’ of UAS

from college.usatoday.com

People name their drones. You can construct a drone from scratch using a 3D printer. Apparently “drone selfies are becoming a thing.” And drones don’t just shoot photos, videos and (for military purposes) bad guys. One model also blasts music, including “a rendition of the U.S. national anthem that would put Daft Punk to shame.”

These are just a few of the fun facts I gathered during a recent scroll-through of the Tumblr blog Drones at Home. Launched last semester as a class project by three Columbia University journalism graduate students, the blog is unique for its focus on the lighter side and stateside activities of the increasingly ubiquitous flying machines. Collectively, its posts prove the devices are quietly exploding nationwide and are being used for much more than surveillance and targeted assassinations.

The young blog’s best recurring feature: “Me and My Drone.” It’s a fascinating, tech-geeky Q&A with impassioned drone owners — from the founder of a volunteer network of drone pilots who assist “search and rescue operations for missing persons” to a recent college graduate nicknamed “Drone Girl.”

While the trio behind Drones at Home — Olivia Feld, Julien Gathelier and Robert Hackett — are not drone owners themselves, they do share an outsized passion for “the universe of stories” drones capture, hover over and cause.

As Gathelier, a 23-year-old Paris native, tells me, “The subject is at the intersection of politics, technology and media, things all of us are interested in for different reasons.”

Feld, 27, a London native and Columbia’s 2013-2014 Alistair Cooke Journalism Fulbright Scholar, similarly shares, “It’s a massively emerging new field in so many realms — in terms of the commercial opportunities … and also the possibilities for journalists and journalism. We were all kind of mutually excited about this technology and how it’s being used around the world and its potential use in the future.”

In the group interview below, Feld, Gathelier and Hackett — who each earned their journalism master’s degrees in May — discuss the blog’s beginnings, the drone mania at the core of their coverage and drones’ potential impact on journalism. They also offer some tips for students seeking to launch a similarly successful niche-news site.

Q: What led the three of you to start Drones at Home?

Gathelier: It started as a class assignment where we were supposed to create a blog and attract an audience. We were assigned together, which was great for us because we were friends before. It was a class with Emily Bell [director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism] and Margaret Sullivan [New York Times public editor] called Audience and Engagement — focused on how you’re supposed to interact with your audience on the web.

We were assigned a broad topic and chose to go with drones because we were interested in tech, security and surveillance stories. As we went along, we focused more on domestic drones rather than their use abroad. This was an aspect of drones not reported as often in the media. … Many outlets are writing about the U.S. drone program in Pakistan and whatnot, but the little flying things also do a lot of exciting stuff for the average consumer, and the legal situation surrounding drones is also a little muddled at the moment. It all creates a whole set of tensions that are really interesting to report on.

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