What will happen to the read-only?

The worries I have about online journalism are not whether journalists will still have a role to play, and a job in the long term. Of course they will. People are always going to want to read something, and while User Generated Content (UGC) contributions are important, it can’t be relied on (yet) that every single day, of every single month, every year, people are going to want to upload good, useable content.

No, the worries I have are what will happen to the people who don’t engage with online journalism? I worry about what will happen to those who like to sit down with the newspaper and a cuppa; those who pop into the shop on their way to work for the paper and read nothing else all day; and the people who don’t have unlimited internet access at all times. What will they do if everything goes online?

  

 A few weeks ago, in the best lecture I’ve ever attended (and there have been many), Dr Andy Williams , of Cardiff University , suggested that it was just 1% of the news consuming population who like to contribute UGC and regularly participate in interactive news. Be it posting comments, chatting in forums or uploading content, only 1% of people do it as standard. Another 9% will participate from time-to-time, but not regularly, leaving 90% of people as read-only consumers.

 

Now, if people in the industry continue to focus on ideas  like the model suggested by the absent Alison Gow , in a presentation last week, whereby journalists could post first drafts of news stories on blogs (ready and waiting for user contributions and changes), news updates can be sent by Twitter messages, the latest updates can be live-streamed onto websites…etc. If (remarkable and innovative – no argument) ideas like these are focused on with the ardour and determination characteristic of new media developments, what will happen to already dwindling newspaper industry ? And the internet-less readers left behind by the technological news revolution? 

 

Will the news become biased towards the tech-savvy who regularly contribute? Will a knowledge divide emerge between the economic advantaged who have more internet access than the less privileged? Will news production become more focused on allowing user interactivity than getting the hard, accurate story? Or will it revolutionise the access journalist have to information, and make news more instant, reliable and representative of all areas?

 

I guess the problem is that nobody knows, and as such, perhaps more should be done now to save print, and offline news resources for the 90% who prefer to just read.

 

 

UGC: Do journalists need to act as gatekeepers?

 

It’s an intricate issue, gate keeping, even in professional terms, with weighted arguments both for and against. But what are the justifications of organisations like the BBC for insisting on moderation of UGC, and why do some, like CNN, appear to allow ‘unedited, unfiltered’ UGC?

 

To bottom line things, what we should really be asking firstly is, ‘Is UGC good enough to take over the role of professional journalism?’ If that answer is yes, then it could be supposed that UGC needs no further help from professionals, editing or otherwise. But there are a few things to consider before coming to an answer.

 

The BBC’s UGC is filtered and checked before it is allowed to go live on their online platforms. They have a 30-strong team, to edit material and filter out defamatory, inaccurate and unsuitable content, before the higher quality material is uploaded. While some may think this an unnecessary infringement on the right to freedom of expression, it has been successful in avoiding hoax material being used on the BBC (such as CNN iReport’s Elk in Dorset photograph), and allows the BBC to protect their trustworthy brand name.

 

Peter Bale, in a study carried out by Alfred Hermida and Neil Thurman in 2006, said “not to moderate content would be an inappropriate brand risk.” And he is correct in the sense that branded news production teams, like the BBC, The Guardian and so on, have worked for years to build a reputation as good quality, trustworthy, reliable sources of news. To disregard the procedures in place that ensure this happens, so that citizen journalists feel as though they too get a ‘fair’ say in what’s news, would be to sacrifice the seal of quality that comes with a reputable news brand.

 

As The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart noted, in a spoof of CNN’s iReport site, (quote: “my balls are on Wolf Blitzer’s head”), not all UGC is going to be hard hitting, newsworthy material. In which case, to receive quality, moderation is needed to assess the most newsworthy content from the otherwise irrelevant. It’s the way professionals have always worked, and if professional journalism needs checking and editing – why would amateur journalism ever be thought not to?

 

UGC has its positives, no doubt. The first images of the Asian Tsunami and disasters in China were sent in by people capturing things on their mobile phones, which a video crew would have missed, or not been able to get access to. The assassination of JFK and beating of Rodney King were also captured by the citizen journalist rather than the professional. There is quality UGC out there, but, just as in professional practice, it needs to be tweaked or edited.

 

 

Freedom of expression is all very well, but when producing content that is going to be published to the world, legal and ethical obligations need to be taken into account. Professional journalists are reminded of these constraints everyday. Content gets reworked, pulled, and edited to avoid breaching any legal issues such as defamation, and to ensure nothing unethical or morally ‘wrong’ is published.

 

Amateur journalists and UGC should also need to adhere to these constraints if they wish to publish content in the same sphere as professional material. However, since there is no training or regulation to ensure they do so, moderation of uploaded UGC will have to continue.

 

The role of the news media is meant to be to provide an objective, informative view of current issues in society. To do so, content needs to be assessed for relevance, quality, accuracy, reliability and its ethical and legal appropriateness. This should stand whatever the level of the journalist – be they professional, amateur, citizen or blogger.

Online Fears?

In Ancient Rome the news was carved onto stone or metal and posted in public places. Between 713 and 734, the Tang Dynasty in China handwrote government news onto silk. News wasn’t disseminated in the way which we take for granted until early 18^th century with the first regular English daily paper. So, given that journalism and news reporting has always undergone change, restructuring, and adaptation to new technology, why should the latest technological developments create such fear? And why should immediate messaging tools such as Twitter create feelings of uselessness?

 

“The media in all it’s forms sometimes becomes too cynical, too ready to assume the worst, and to construct the general out of the particular” said  Prince Charles in a speech to celebrate 300 years of newspapers in Britain, 11 March 2002. It was if he had already heard Ian Reeves playing the prophet doom with “I have seen the future, and we’re not in it.”

 

Invention of printers brought us forward from handwritten pamphlets and scrolls. Telegraph technology connected people across countries, and then the telephone did that even better. Wireless radio and television brought the news one step closer to real-time and gave audiences moving pictures and recorded voice clips. All these developments were positive, useful and welcome. Online media, simply merges all these elements into one space and brings it to us faster than ever before. That’s not going to spell the end of journalism; it’s just going to speed things up and change the way things are done. Tools like Twitter , although they can be used by everyone who morphs into a ‘citizen journalist’ from time to time, are things that can be taken full advantage of, to improve and revolutionise journalism.

 

In April 2008, James Karl Buck , managed to free himself from an Egyptian prison with the one-word Twitter message “arrested.” While an amazing demonstration of how powerful and useful the immediacy of online communication can be, I feel that something important has been slightly overlooked. While detained, Buck was able to send updates of his situation through Twitter messages on his mobile phone every few hours, constantly reporting to everyone who had internet access a blow-by-blow account of what was happening. Up until his “free” Tweet, investigative journalism went real-time, and typed journalism went ‘live’ in the same way only broadcast media had previously been able to do.

 

In the same way, MG Siegler , writing for VentureBeat.com , recalls the power of using Twitter in conjunction with social conversation and aggregation site FriendFeed during (not after) an earthquake that hit South California, near LA in July of this year. “Minutes after the quake I had various accounts of it and a map of it’s epicentre…the first Tweet came mere seconds after the earthquake hit, the AP pushed out its first wire item on the news nine-minutes after people were already Tweeting.” Before news reports were even broadcasted, MG Siegler had managed to gather enough information to compile eye-witness comments, maps of affected areas and an up-to-date account of what had happened. Enough information for a researched and accurate report of an event, in written form, before any ‘live’ media could disseminate their own coverage.

 

Marshall Kirkpatrick, writing for ReadWriteWeb.com, describes how he uses Twitter to gather information in a similar way, “Twitter itself is very useful for performing public interviews. By putting out single or multiple questions into our Twitter networks in a call-and-response fashion, we’ve gathered piles of rich research in far less time than it would have taken to try and call people on the phone.”

 

There have always been technological developments that affect the media, and none have so far served to supplant journalism. Immediacy tools are there to be taken advantage of, and utilised by professional journalists that can realise their power, and combine that with the skill, ethics and professional standards.