Drone journalism set for takeoff – once they're permitted to use our airspace

It was a film that inspired Professor Matt Waite to set up the Drone Journalism Lab. It begins with a man walking across a field, carrying a large metal briefcase. He stops, opens it, revealing what looks like a model aircraft. Using a tablet computer, he selects part of the surrounding area on a digital map, then transfers the flight plan to the model aircraft and launches it into the sky. It flies on autopilot, taking thousands of pictures before landing in a pre-programmed zone. The man removes a memory stick from the device and uploads the data for processing. A few hours later, he's viewing a high-definition terrain map compiled from the photos.

This isn't a science fiction movie. It's the product demo for the Gatewing X100, one of a number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that anyone can buy today. These machines, commonly known as drones, are already used by the military, the police and the agricultural industry for a variety of purposes – some bloody, some benign and some seemingly designed to provoke people into quoting from George Orwell's 1984.

But when Waite, an award-winning investigative reporter, stumbled across the X100 during a visit to a major geographical technology event, he was immediately struck by how it could be used for journalism.

"My reporter brain went 'well there's every tornado, every hurricane, I've ever covered'. This device would be able to do hyper-accurate damage-assessment maps in a matter of hours. With traditional reporting techniques, it takes days, if not weeks. We could rapidly change the way we cover disasters by using UAVs."

He took out his credit card, hoping to buy an X100 and begin experimenting. But there were two problems: firstly, they cost around £40,000; secondly, it's illegal to fly one in United States airspace. So Waite went home empty handed.

Still, he couldn't shake the idea of using drones for journalism. So with the help of a $50,000 (£30,000) grant and the support of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he founded the Drone Journalism Lab to explore the technical, ethical and legal issues.

Getting off the ground

With the X100 way beyond his budget, Waite turned to a £200 off-the-shelf drone, the Parrot AR. This small, lightweight device can be controlled using a smartphone or tablet. It's also able to stream real-time HD video footage to a computer.

Of course, bigger drones that can carry bulky news cameras and fly for long periods cost thousands of pounds more. But that's still cheap compared with the cost of hiring a helicopter or plane to capture aerial footage.

"If you don't have the kind of huge budget you need to keep a helicopter around all the time, then suddenly this becomes an interesting opportunity," says Professor Robert G Picard, of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford. The institute is staging a drone journalism workshop on 22 October.

However, the day when Sky News trades in its "SkyCopter" for a drone is still some way off. For starters, Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) regulations make it difficult to fly a drone in built-up areas – the very places where a news drone would be most effective. They can't be flown further than 500 meters from the operator, or higher than 400 feet, which limits their usefulness for news gathering.

The situation could change in a few years time: a European Commission working paper released in September outlines plans to open up European civil airspace to unmanned drones by 2016 (a similar law will come into effect in 2015 in the US), which would allow them to operate alongside manned aircraft.

Some major media organisations are already experimenting with drone technology, though. The BBC's research and development department has been working with Southampton University students to kit out a UAV with BBC broadcast cameras. And in Australia, where commercial drone activity has been licensed since 2002, the news programme 60 Minutes caused a stir last year when it flew a small UAV over an immigration detention centre.

But it's activists, academics and a small army of DIY drone enthusiasts who are really driving the nascent drone journalism movement. For example, during the Occupy Wall Street protests, a modified Parrot AR II drone, dubbed the "occucopter", was used to stream live footage over the internet. Protests in Poland and Moscow have also been filmed and photographed with drones.

Ethical questions

Of course, UAVs could also be used for less noble kinds of journalism, giving rise to a host of privacy and civil liberty issues. For example, one can easily imagine swarms of paparazzi drones following unfortunate celebrities, or hovering above their Hello-exclusive weddings. Nevertheless, Waite believes existing privacy laws will cover many of these eventualities.

"The question I often ask myself is this: is this a new ethical problem, or is this an old ethical problem involving new tools?" He says the furore over the topless photographs of Kate Middleton illustrates the point. "A lot of people beyond Buckingham Palace believe that was a pretty gross violation of privacy. So does the fact that a UAV could have been used change that at all? It doesn't."

Matthew Schroyer, a drone and data journalist, and the founder of the Professional Society of Drone Journalists, has created a drone journalism code of ethics wiki to encourage discussion of these issues. "I think we can meet the challenge together as a group if we abide by codes of conduct," he says, adding: "There's a lot of value to be had from these flying robots, as long as we use them ethically."

Although drone journalism can't take off properly while commercial restrictions remain in place, Waite believes this is also a blessing in disguise. "It [drone journalism] is not here yet because the law says it can't be," he says. "But that's also a gift. The time we have between now and 2015 in the US, or anything from 2016 to 2020 in the EU, will give journalists the opportunity to really think about how they're going to use this technology."

Duncan Jefferies is a freelance journalist.

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