A study of user-generated content at the BBC, presented by Claire Wardle, Andrew Williams and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff in 2009, found that audience contributions had consolidated journalistic norms rather than changed them.
The corporation treated such material mainly as newsgathering: a supply of photographs and video, eyewitness accounts and story tip-offs. The institutional framing showed in the title of the BBC’s own training course on the subject, “Have they got news for us”. A dedicated UGC hub, grown from three people in 2005 to 23 by the time of the study, sat physically next to newsgathering at the centre of the news operation, where staff trawled comments and submissions for usable content and for eyewitnesses who could be passed to radio and television as interviewees.
The researchers described the working method as sorting the wheat from the chaff, with the wheat defined narrowly: eyewitness material, tip-offs and case studies that could appear on air. Journalists were found experimenting with other kinds of audience engagement, and a few were thinking about collaboration or networked journalism, but those examples sat at the periphery.
The conclusion was that at the core of BBC News, audience participation had been institutionalised as a way of gathering news rather than as a route to a different kind of journalism, and that this reinforced the existing relationship between journalists and their audience.