From a Macworld chat with Flickr co-founder and general manager Stewart Butterfield:
http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/03/09/flickr/index.php
IDGNS: If you’re the eyes of the world, do you foresee Flickr getting a news component?
Butterfield: Yes, we already allow for that and it already happens but it’s not surfaced nor packaged up very well. But almost every day, Flickr is used as a source for photos that either don’t exist anywhere else or that there’s just a bigger variety on Flickr. A good example is when the New York Yankee player’s plane crashed into a [Manhattan] building. A text bulletin went out on the wires but there weren’t photos available, so the Yahoo front page team did a search for “NYC crash” on Flickr and found the first couple of photos that had been posted and weren’t available from any other source at that time. By the time photos started coming out of the wire services, there were dozens and dozens of images from different people on Flickr, and that’s where the Yahoo front page pointed to, linking to the Flickr photos. Expanding that capability and making it easier so it’s not a manual process is definitely something we’re interested in.