Einar Thorsen of Bournemouth University, UK, was one of the final presenters at the IAMCR 2010 in Braga.
He looked at how the relationship between BBC online journalism and ctizenship during the 2005 and 2010 UK General Elections.
In a quick presentation, Thorsen explained how civic engagement as a key of the BBC mandate reflected in its election coverage online.
For the 2010 election, the BBC viewed election news as a product. He described how the 2010 election website was a pan-BBC project, compared to a more fragmented approach in 2005.
One of the aims was to distinguish web coverage from broadcast output as user research had shown that audiences were unaware of original features online.
Another issue was a strategic discussion of how the BBC covered politics online in an attempt to attract more people to politics.
Thorsen showed a BBC live updates page, incorporating reports from BBC journalists, user emails and tweets. But it was based on a manual process, with an individual cutting and pasting bits of HTML content into a static page.
Everything was verified and checked by a second pair of eyes, said Thorsen, usually a person looking over a journalist’s shoulder.
For the 2010 election, the BBC outsourced the moderation of comments, with the BBC monitoring the debate online to select and highlight some comments.
Thorsen highlighted the tensions at the BBC over user contributions.
He found in some BBC journalists that some described UGC and comments as an example of civic engagement online, while other described it as “utter shit” and “a complete waste of time”.
Similarly, the team behind video contributions If I was Prime Minister saw this as the pinnacle of an opportunity for citizen to express their political views. But others were more sceptical.
This was a brief but fascinating insight into Thorsen’s research.
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