User Participation in Turkish News Sites

Copenhagen.
Finally we move on to Aylin Aydogan here at COST298. She, too, points to the changes associated with the rise of Web 2.0, and especially the emergence of user-generated content. Views of these changes as positive developments are hardly new, however - earlier Web-related developments were similarly seen as progress. Today, however, changes are very clearly driven by users and their motivations, and this is shifting the relationship between users and media organisations.

Past research in this context has focussed especially on the impact of citizen journalism and news blogging on news organisations; Aylin's study adds to this in the Turkish context. (She's taking a long time to take us through the existing work in this field, though - I wish she'd get to her work!)

Media organisations have also begun to respond to such developments, of course - not least also by investing in produsage environments (NewsCorp bought MySpace, for example; AFP bought ScoopLive). To some extent, this must be understood as a corporatisation of social media and user-generated content; to some extent the intent is to directly integrate user-generated content into mainstream media organisations' operations. This is also seen in the increasing number of at least mildly interactive features now offered on mainstream news Websites, for example.

But what motivates these changes? Citizen journalism sites are hardly financial competitors to mainstream media (advertising spend on citizen journalism sites is substantially lower than on mainstream news sites); the competition must therefore be seen as being much more about authority and opinion leadership, about status and influence. Additionally, users as content creators can also serve as a cheap additional workforce.

In Turkey, online news sites now provide a number of tools for involving users as contributors - from measuring or rating the popularity or relevance of news stories to more involved models. Aylin's research examines these approaches for four major news sites in the country, and found that commenting on news stories is now the most common form of user participation. She will evaluate the effects of such forms.

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