If user-generated content can be incorporated into Big Media publications, will the conversation be democratic?
A totalitarian call to arms? Photo by rsambrook.
I sent a letter to a computer games magazine when I was 11 to complain, in a general feminist manner, about a sexist article featuring a Baywatch actress and ‘risky’ comments about 14-year boy antics. To my surprise, I received a response from the editor, reading: “I know, you don’t have to work with the tw*t”.
To an 11-year old, the response from an editor – and the open use of a swear word – was both fascinating and exciting. This type of dialogue between editor and reader is something that is becoming increasingly easier to have and in more forms and ways than before.
Before the Net, correspondence between publications and their readers was limited to Letters to the Editor, Problem Pages and Classifieds. Further to users responding and influencing content, ‘users’ are now generating content and extending this two-way dialogue into a conversation.
However, news organisations appear to be struggling to be know how to utilise this User-Generated Content (UGC). Earlier this year, Neil Thurman from London’s City University released a study that claimed that some news websites were struggling to incorporate reader contributions because of legal liabilities, cost and low participation levels.
Futhermore, Thurman says: “By becoming gatekeepers of UGC, editors are on familiar territory….[but] Too much filtering and control could frustrate the supply of UGC”.
In response to Neil Thurman’s study, David Cohn commented on newassignment.net, saying, “We haven’t found a way to bring their participation in on mass scale that appeases our editorial fancies.”
Clearly, User-Generated Content is something that is conflicting with the interests of editors and news organisations. UGC is a ‘conversation’ that cannot simply be filtered and edited to fit in its designated section of a newspaper; UGC can offer more than, for example, the BBC’s “Have Your Say” section, which heavily controls and filters content. But how can publications successfully incorporate user-generated content?
User-Generated magazines such as JPG Magazine and Everywhere Magazine provide an alternative to the simple editorial and consumer conversation where UGC has been fully embraced and forms the bulk of the content. But this is not an example of a publication incorporating UGC within professional journalism; perhaps the two forms of journalism work better when they are seperate entities?
Yet, Dan Gillmor (the director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University) comments that citizen journalism is not a single entity, “but rather as a number of things people can do both individually and in collaboration with traditional media.” But it seems that UGC is either treated as seperate entity (Everywhere Magazine) or a mediated response (BBC ‘Have your Say’) but not as an equal collaboration.
If this colloboration is achieved that it offers an exciting opportunity within the media. Roberto Wohlgemuth, of the Institute of Citizen Journalism based in Canada, says that, “If citizen journalism is to be an effective tool then we will find that citizens are more engaged in their communities and ultimately we will see more effective democracies.”
The conversation has been started. Join it if you will, love it or hate it: journalism has a greater potential to be a voice of the human condition. UGC must be guided within publications but, if it is to represent democracy, then it will have to be given a greater platform of expression and presence within the Big Media dictatorship.
Photograph by rsambrook used under the Creative Commons Licence.
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