One of the research papers at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff analysed the attitudes of local journalists in the UK towards user-generated content. My colleague, Jane Singer, interviewed local journalists working for the Johnston Press to uncover their views on involving the public in the journalistic process. She found that local journalists see UGC as contributing to the journalism they produce. But material from the public was seen
PDF Image via CrunchBase The big news in the citizen journalism space is that Vancouver-based participatory news site NowPublic.com has been sold to the local news network, Examiner.com. The new owners, Philip Anschutz’s Clarity Media Group, are reported to have paid around $25 million. NowPublic was started in 2005 by Canadian entrepreneurs Leonard Brody, Michael Tippett and Michael Meyers, and has raised more than $10m in venture capital. Writing on NowPublic,
A study by the Bivings Group on newspapers and the Internet in the US shows how cautiously legacy media are approaching the web. The study (PDF) quantified the online features of the top 100 newspapers in the USA in 2008. Some features, such as blogs and RSS feeds are commonplace. But there is less uptake of features such as social networking or user-generated content, or let alone reinventing themselves online.
An end of year list by NowPublic.com shows how far user-generated content played a role in the big news events of the year. According to its CEO, Len Brody: 2008 not only proved the concept of user-generated news, but also tipped the scales. The pillars of mainstream media, including the Associated Press, BBC, CBS and CNN have all made significant efforts to embrace the new model. Top of the list
Image via Wikipedia There’s somewhat of a contradiction in the latest posting on the BBC’s Editors Blog by Helen Boaden, director of BBC News. Introducing the post, she writes: This week I gave the keynote speech at the e-Democracy conference. You can read what I said below. I would be interested to know what you think. The speech gives an overview of the BBC’s approach to citizen journalism. But even
Image by garyturner via Flickr Comments by a senior BBC News executive at the Media Society event, ‘Broadsheet vs Broadband’ in London offer an insight into how the corporation views user-generated content. Pete Clifton, who has the unwieldy title of head of editorial development for multimedia journalism explained how UGC fit into the BBC’s newsgathering: It’s gathering in insights that the audience have that we can make sense of and
The BBC has long been leading the way in user-generated content, using photos and videos from the public in its reporting. It has just launched two new participatory journalism initiatives. One is the appointment of an Interactive Reporter, Siobhan Courtney. On the BBC Editors blog, Matthew Eltringham, explains her “beat is simply all the content you’ve been sending in to us.” The appointment is welcomed but it is simply newsgathering
Preliminary research presented at the Convergence and Society conference in South Carolina suggests that comments on a news story affect the perception of bias in the story itself. Michele Jones, a Phd student at the University of North Carolina, wanted to investigate the impact that comments had on credibility and reader perception of bias in the news She conducted an online experiment with 76 participants reading a story about abortion
I’m pleased to say that a journal article on professional attitudes to user-generated content by myself and Neil Thurman of City University, London, has been published. The research paper, called A Clash of Cultures: The integration of user-generated content within professional journalistic frameworks at British newspaper websites, is published in October 2008 issue of Journalism Practice. The paper is available online, but it is behind a subscription wall. Here is
Image via Wikipedia Much of the discussion at the AEJMC annual conference has focused on user-generated content (UGC) and how journalists should adapt to this changing environment. Jane Singer from the University of Central Lancashire is one of the leading researchers in this area. She talked about how online created a shared space, whereas print was largely a space controlled by journalists. Her most recent research looked at the attitudes