No Revolution: User-Generated Content at the BBC

Cardiff.
The next speaker at Future of Journalism 2009 is Andy Williams, who shifts our attention to user-generated content at the BBC, with a study based on interviews with BBC staff conducted in 2007. Andy, too, notes the substantial shift in perceptions towards a more active role for audiences (journalism as less lecture and more conversation), but in practice, journalist/audience roles at the BBC seem to have ossified rather than opened up.

BBC news has wholeheartedly embraced audience content (footage and photos, eyewitness accounts, audience stories); beyond this, however, also lie other forms of user-generated content, including audience comments, collaborative content, networked journalism, and non-news content. To embrace such content, there is a need for a new institutional framework; BBC journalists are now trained in engaging with UGC, and the phrase 'have they got news for us' is emblematic for this.

However, mainly this training is still about processing user-contributed material (and spotting hoaxes); there is very little openness to collaborative, participatory journalism here, and this is reflected in BBC staff statements about UGC time and again. One example are the comments by the BBC's Peter Horrocks about the editorial sifting process of user comments following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, describing this process as separating wheat from chaff.

Claire Wardle now takes over, and notes some developments beyond this understanding of UGC at the BBC in recent years - not least also driven by the establishment of the BBC UGC Hub, a team of 23 journalists in the BBC's integrated newsroom. These journalists liaise with editors and journalists about what kind of UGC is needed, elicit UGC from users and connect user content creators with journalists as required, and process audience material. The Hub is seen in the first place as a newsgathering tool, but also positions the BBC even more as a space for public debate.

Moderation here (on the Have Your Say Website) is not outsourced to other companies, but done in-house by trained journalists; these check for interesting eyewitness accounts and audiovisual material, encourage tip-offs, and seek out users whose experiences may be able to be used for case studies embedded into the mainstream news coverage. If the BBC approach has been too journo-centric in the past, then, there have been gradual shifts in recent times - but there has been no major revolution here: UGC is now being integrated into BBC processes as just another news source. However, this mindset still limits the possibilities for other forms of engaging with UGC in pursuit of more participatory forms of journalism.

Technorati : BBC, FoJ 2009, citizen journalism, journalism, participation, produsage, user-generated content
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