ABSTRACT
The direction of drone use by the media is being driven by activists, enthusiasts, teachers and early adopters. The drone on its programmed path surveying acres of crops to detect if any are suffering from disease will not impact upon the public's imagination half as much as the one recording the results of a road accident for the local news. There are structural attributes to journalism that drones will not necessarily solve or bypass. These attributes include a decline in civic reporting, a reliance on official sources, the amount of press release material recycled among diminishing outlets, the narrow social background of key journalists, the political economy of news organizations or the news values which underpin reporting. The fact that ethics is an integral part of most learning environments for drone journalism is vital since they are increasingly deployed in areas where civil society has broken down.
