During El Salvador's recent presidential elections, Salvadoran newspaper La Prensa Gráfica found a unique angle from the skies. LPG used a quadcopter to capture scenes on voting day as voters flocked to the polls in the Central American country. It's fascinating to see drones find more acceptance in journalism, but the story also serves to highlight the fact that US journalists currently are barred from doing the same thing.The Salvadoran election was neck-and-neck, with left-leaning Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front candidate Salvador Sánchez Cerén carrying a narrow lead that will likely require a runoff. LPG's drone footage mostly captured people strolling to the polls, but as a proof of concept, it worked swimmingly. As Francie Diep at Popular Science writes, it's not the first appearance of journalism drones in Latin America, as a pair of Brazilian outlets notably used them last year.Ironically, in a mid-January post announcing that it had the first journalism drone in the country, LPG notes that it has joined "media like the BBC, U.S. National Geographic, CNN, [and] schools of journalism." While it's true that US media have used drones in reportage, the FAA says such use is currently barred.In early January, Poynter wrote about the use of a drone by the Spokesman-Review, a paper in Spokane, Washington, to report on a local event. While the photographer using the drone said it fit into a "gray area," an FAA spokesman told Poynter that "“if you’re using [a drone] for any sort of commercial purposes, including journalism, that’s not allowed."The problem is that the FAA still hasn't laid out regulation for commercial drones. The administration must do so by 2015 as part of the FAA Modernization Act of 2012, but it was already a year late on selecting its drone testing sites. Until the FAA sorts out the commercial drone landscape, the US will continue to fall behind other countries in getting money-making drones in the sky. And as the Nieman Journalism Lab points out in a handy guide, that means journalists also have to wait.It's a sticky problem, to be sure. As I've said before, we shouldn't need more laws to regulate drone photography, and for now the FAA is cool with hobbyists flying drones under the usual 400 foot ceiling. But where to draw the line between journalist and hobbyist?On one hand, imagine if ever major news outlet started using drones at big breaking news events. Take the Boston bombing last year, for example: If a bunch of drones were flying overhead, they certainly would have provided a valuable perspective. At the same time, justified or not, they'd surely have caused alarm, and the last thing anyone would need is drones crashing into each other and falling out of the skies.At the same time, blanket banning of drone usage for journalistic purposes for the duration of the FAA's multi-year deliberations is a waste. Along from getting cool footage, LPG's use of drones highlights how useful they can be as reporting tools. Imagine, for example, using drone surveys to help study waiting times for voting booths, which was a huge issue in the 2012 US presidential election. But useful or not, drones won't be finding much usage in US reporting until the FAA changes its mind.
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