Monday 27 April 2009

User Generated Content: Understanding its Impact Upon Contributors, Non-Contributors and the BBC

This is just too tantalising for words:

The main findings of the research were that:

  • There are 5 main types of "UGC" and they fulfill 6 different roles within the BBC
  • Journalists and audiences display markedly different attitudes towards the five types
  • Technology is changing the volume, ease and speed of gathering news material and sources, but traditional journalism practices still important
  • "UGC" at the local level is particularly interesting
  • Overall there is support from the audience for the ways in which the BBC has been using "UGC"
  • Specific calls to action are most useful for news gathering and when eliciting high-quality relevant comment
  • only a small, select group of people submit "UGC"
  • UGC should never be treated as representative
  • significant barriers to participation: digital divide, social economic background, lack of impetus, and - most interesting for me - negative perceptions held by general audience of contributors
  • contributors want a real world impact for the contributions - eg. "If it was going to be read by Gordon Brown, then of course I'd submit it..."
The study also identified a typology of audience material:
  • audience content
  • audience comments
  • collaborative content
  • networked journalism
  • non-news content ("photos of snowmen")
I hope we find out more.

Wednesday 22 April 2009

On what's occurring

Long time since I've posted. What with Twitter and Yammer and Facebook there seems to be less of an imperative to blog.

But for the record some recent highlights include

  • The soft-launch of three new online business communities in the last few weeks - TravelHub, TableTalk and OpticianSpace.
  • Farmers Weekly Interactive live-blogging today's budget
  • Our series of weekly editorial development sessions ("Elevenses" because they are at 11am) are going really well. Topics so far: Twits, Tweets and Hashtags: The quick guide to Twittering, Investigative Journalism, Using Polls & Surveys, Exploiting the power of RSS, Live blogging, Features Without Words
All worth doing.