I have been at the ICA annual conference in Montreal this week, talking about the research that Neil Thurman and myself have done into “participatory journalism” in Britain. What follows is a shortened version of the talk by Neil Thurman and myself, but it is still on the long side for a blog post. The term participatory journalism is itself rather ill defined. We’ve taken it to mean the technical,

Letting the public into the hallowed halls of journalism is a divisive issue among editors. A study by my friend and colleague, Neil Thurman of City University, revealed just how divided the UK news media is over user-generated content. His paper, “Forums for citizen journalists? Adoption of user generated content initiatives by online news media”, published in New Media & Society, examines attitudes to letting audiences contribute to professionally edited