Jessica Elgot

Is User Generated Content good for a democratic free press? Dr Andy Williams, a Cardiff University journalism researcher (who took my Online Journalism lecture last week) believes it can be, but it’s definitely not there yet.

There are the obvious problems. People who post are generally those who are politically active anyway, it’s not really reaching out to edges of the community we’re writing for. And a more troubling concern is if you hide behind an avatar, you can say what you like, and you can get yourselves, your subjects, and the news organisation that picks up your “story” into a lot of trouble. The Dorset Elk is a much cited example, but there are others.

But I think there’s a deeper problem at the root of UGC, and one that needs addressing. We need to make UGC truly a “conversation” and as equal an exchange as possible.

At present a lot of journalists who I’ve met have chosen to ignore or mock most UGC postings or pictures. We’ve only got to look at the derision with which “Your News” from the BBC was treated to see a general attitude towards outside contributors to the industry (although it is pretty stupid). When journalists do bother to listen or reply, it’s usually selfish. We use contributors pictures, steal their ideas from forum posting, and attribute their videos to “a Youtube user.”

I’ve done it myself. During my work experience at the Daily Mirror this summer, I spent one day a week working with the 3am girls, trawling the Big Brother forums on the BB website and Digital Spy, looking for fair-weather “friends” of housemates posting dirt on the forums so we could buy the full dung heap for dirty cash. My editors couldn’t care less what other people on the forums had to say, because it wasn’t worth anything to them. But a murmur of past misdemeanours, or a juicy old photo, and bingo! This UGC is a goldmine.

But the citizens are taking back the power from right under our noses and it’s at our expense. Roy Greenslade wrote a short piece in Media Guardian two weeks ago about the Teesside Evening Gazette, owned by Trinity Mirror, which is aiming to recruit 1,000 citizen journalists for its individual localised news websites over the next year. The 22 community websites, which feature content written by a combination of 400 non-journalists and the Gazette’s editorial team, attract 150,000 unique users a month.

That’s a pretty huge change from how we would normally expect to receive local news, and indeed why not have it coming from the people who experience the news in that locality every day? Isn’t it a coincidence that this interest in citizen journalism and UGC from big media corporations is happening at the height of when regional papers, particularly Trinity Mirror, have annouced more job cuts for journalists. And citizen journalists come cheaper than regular ones. Being made redundant has just taken on a whole new meaning.

I don’t think the UGC revolution has quite happened yet. It can’t happen until we, as journalists accept its huge benefits and anticipate its limitations. Then perhaps our conversation with our readers and the rest of the world will be a little bit more balanced. UGC is a wonderful thing, and such a great tool for journalists and for the public to hit the news bang on the nail by working together. Right now though, we’re still too worried the mob are getting just a little bit too close to the ivory tower.