The set of guidelines about user-generated content produced by industry body, the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association (CBA), aims to help broadcasters get the most out of working with the audience. The guidelines, available as a PDF, cover familiar ground on concerns about quality of the content and potential legal issues. It acknowledges that: The most apparent benefit for broadcasters of using UGC is that it provides free access to material which

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

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

The Convergence and Society: The Participatory Web conference at the University of South Carolina kicked off with a session on convergence and citizen journalism. First up was Thomas Baggerman of Capital University, who has looked at US TV stations application of citizen media. His findings after looking at 103 TV websites confirms what other studies have shown. Most seek to control the kind of content from the public that is

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