There are stories from China, Philippines, Nicaragua or Iraq that don’t get told enough through the press syndicates and major networks. Pictures of refugees, protests, local heroes, monks, farmers, and the “word on the street” captured through a lens.

To fill these needs are the unpaid stringers with cameras who share their world view, if we only care to look. Someday, a smart citizen journalism outfit will find a way to create an on-demand “newspaper” out of a mashup of Flickr, country blogs, and stories from the underground.

For now, just go to Flickr, and type in the country you wanna know more about, and I guarantee you’ll see and hear of things you never knew, or are right now taking place –captured by an amateur perhaps.

Since it is five years since the Iraq war began, newspapers have been trying to sum it up or explain it through op-ed pieces, in-depth reports and pictures. You may have forgotten or not seen this one. An image from Iraq taken by one Michael Yon. That’s Major Yon. On his blog, he tells the story of Major Mark Bieger who rushed to the side of a child soon after a car bomb exploded on their convoy that had attracted a crowd of children.

This is how the other half lives. We don’t get to hear about these narratives every day in a news cycle crowded out by the erratic behavior of Wall Street or the obsessive attention to scandals, the Clintons or some technology conference.