I'm working on a documentary about a friend of mine that got a dui and is trying to go sober. 2 days after he got out of jail he saw a real bad car accident where a pedestrian died because of some drunk drivers, knocked over a school bus and 40 something kids got injured. Anyway it was all over the news and I'm trying to figure out if I could use some footage from the news report in the documentary, like just a few clips. Either raw footage, news chopper footage or footage with the news reporter. The project will probably just go online for free, but then what if I did end up putting it out and selling it?

News reports are copyrighted. You may fall into the "fair use"
category. Before you use any copyrighted material it's best to
do your due diligence - which really should include speaking to
a lawyer. Asking for permission is an option.

This is second hand, but I saw an indie short at a festival this weekend that included clips of an presidential press conference. I asked the director how much the clip set him back and he said he'd gotten it free from Voice of America, the international broadcast arm of the federal government. Because VOA is funded by tax dollars, anything produced exclusively for VOA is in the public domain. I still haven't done the research to corroborate this, and obviously it wouldn't help the original poster, but thought it was a clever way to get news footage.