Results tagged “user-generated content”

Australian public broadcaster the ABC has launched a new digital initiative called ABC Open to feature user-generated content on existing ABC local websites.

The initiative aims to develop the digital skills of local communities to tell their own stories. The reports produced through the project will be published on the broadcaster's local websites and other sites, and may also be distributed on radio, television or mobile platforms.

More than 50 editors and producers, based in local radio offices around the country, will be charged with helping communities design and develop media-rich local stories.

"Blogging is the biggest change to BBC journalism", Kevin Marsh, the head of the corporation's College of Journalism, said at the Journalism rewired conference. He added that blogging by senior figures like Robert Peston and Nick Robinson has helped to fundamentally change the way BBC delivers its news.

Kevin Marsh told conference attendees that in the last couple of years, the BBC had shifted its news focus away from its traditional TV bulletins, adopting a "live and continuous" model centered on multimedia content on the web, according to the PressGazette.

About a month ago, Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, published a post on his blog about an idea that could make journalism better by allowing more people to participate in the journalistic process: ExplainThis.

Aware of the importance of context and research in the news environment, Rosen explained to the Poynter Online that his idea was based on a user-centric approach to news.

Everyblock is betting on hyperlocal once again.

Just this week, Everyblock announced the release of Notify Your Neighbors, a new service that will allow people to share updates of what is happening in their neighborhoods and on their blocks, as a press release from the company explained.

The newest addition to Everyblock's services will be available on everyblock.com and as an application for the iPhone and iPod touch, too. The free application will allow consumers to send and receive updates from any location.

Clay Shirky, journalism intellectual extraordinaire, was interviewed at Yale University for a conference on The New News Ecology: "Who will pay for the messenger?" by Leonard Witt for Sustainable Journalism. 

Citizenside, a Paris-based citizen photojournalism agency, has launched an Android application that allows its members to upload images to its site directly from the scene of the action.

Citizenside invites its amateur photographer members to send in any images they think are newsworthy and the pictures and videos are made available for sale to mainstream media outlets once they have passed a reliability check. The company is part-owned by Agence France-Presse, and Citizenside's amateur photos are included in AFP's image forum. 

WhoRunsGov.com, a Washington Post-run site that tracks D.C. politicians, emerged from beta this week with two new platforms for user-generated content. The site is billed as a "moderated wiki," with 700 profiles of US lawmakers, members of Obama's administration and other government officials.

The site first launched in January. Since the public launch, users can create new profiles or modify existing content, although WhoRunsGov.com staff will monitor their contributions. Profiles are a bit of a mash-up between a Wikipedia entry and a Facebook page, with photos and YouTube videos as well as links to the profiles of "key associates" and related news stories. Much like Wikipedia, the content is backed up by links to outside sources, most of which are not WaPo news stories.

Last May, Washingtonpost.com introduced a new commenting system for its video features that seeks to make order of the sometimes chaotic comment field. Called "WebCom," the interface lays out comments in a web to show which are the most popular with other readers and which have received the most replies.

Unlike on many other newspaper sites, when a comment was made has no bearing on its placement in the web. Rather, those that have sparked the most follow-up discussion appear closer to the center and those ranked most popular by other readers appear the largest. Different colors are used to distinguish which comments are the most recent.

The virtue of the Internet is its inclusive, interactive nature. News sites' reader comment sections provide users with the chance to air their own views and debate stories of particular interest. Yet, as these conversations at times degenerate into uncivilised virtual sparring contests, or are hijacked by prejudiced and abusive persons, website managers are increasingly having to review their comments section policy.  

The Fargo Forum experiment is a fitting example of this state of affairs. Six months ago, the North Dakota news site took the opportunity with the upgrading of its server software to liberalise its user comments policy. Reader comments, regardless of content could be published freely and the Forum would only interfere if a posting received a complaint. Unfortunately, the freedom was exploited by "a few bad apples" according to the Forum's  editor Matthew Von Pinnon, and the quality of the debates degenerated into "low and petty discourse". Six months later, the experiment was abandoned.

The fast-moving world of news media demands innovation, and there is little guarantee of success. Yet, as the foundering of the Printed Blog experiment in the US has shown, efforts at something new, whatever their success, emerge to inspire and inform.  Thus, a new project, the Blogpaper is being developed in the UK based on a similar concept to the Printed Blog whereby content generated online is collated into a printed newsheet.

The project is in its beta stages. In theory, the blogpaper will be the collected effort of an online "news community", which will create written and multimedia content, to be ranked by fellow members of the community. If a piece of content receives sufficient support, it will be printed and moved onto the front pages of the site. The project aims to widen participation in publishing decisions, so that rather than a select group exerting control over what content is published and consequently read, the "blogpaper is aiming at putting the majority in charge".

The Printcasting model is on its way to "democratise" print publishing in more cities in the US, it was announced last week. The initiative, financed by the winnings of the 2008 Knight News Challenge, has made its first newspaper partnership with Denver-based MediaNews Group. The publishing group controls 54 daily newspapers in 11 states, including The Denver Post and San Jose Mercury News.

The project originated out of the newspaper, the Bakersfield Californian and first went public in March to cater for the town of Bakersfield, California.

True/Slant is a recent arrival on the online-only news scene, aiming to offer a voice not only to its 100 or so contributors, but to the reader and the advertiser also. It is not a typical news site offering breaking news, but rather features commentary, opinion and some original reporting. Based in New York, the start-up has just six full-time staff, led by founder and CEO Lewis Dvorkin who has a total of 35 years of media experience, the last 12 of which has been in online news. The other employees have a similar mix of traditional and new media backgrounds, he said. T/S is a privately held company funded by Forbes Media and Velocity Interactive Group. The Editors Weblog spoke to Dvorkin to find out more.

The five differences

Dvorkin stressed the five ways in which T/S is "very different from any other news site." Firstly, because of the tools that it gives its journalists to create their own original content in real time. Second, because of its approach to copyright: contributors are encouraged to offer their perspective "around a piece of content that might have been produced elsewhere." Third, the relationship between the contributor and the audience is different because the contributors are contractually obliged to interact with their community. The last two differences are that the journalists have a variety of salary options and that the site has adopted an unusual approach to advertising.

For entrepreneurial journalists

True/slant offers "entrepreneurial" journalists their own homepage on the web, or as Dvorkin put it, "we enable them to create their own brand of one." They must be "experienced" in a specific field such as finance, politics or health but do not have to be a journalist from a traditional background: bloggers, authors or academics are also welcome. True/Slant is not a typical news publication with an editorial line, rather the work of a collection of individuals. "We don't have any ideology here, we have 100 different contributors, 100 different voices and 100 different perspectives," Dvorkin said.

Interaction with the audience is compulsory. Apart from that, it is up to each contributor to decide what they write and when. Much of what they write is opinion and commentary, but some also do original reporting. It is easy for them to comment on other news, by simply highlighting a section of an article they find on the web and clicking a button, the highlighted text will be placed on their post with a link to the contributing site. They are able to publish photos, audio and video as well as text and can self publish in real time. Their content can be automatically posted to Twitter and Facebook at the time of publishing. There is no traditional editing process in place, Dvorkin explained. Contributors are welcome to discuss their article ideas with a member of the T/S team, but they are not edited before publishing.

Different payment options are available, depending on the amount of risk that an individual contributor wants to take: journalists can choose to receive a monthly stipend, to participate in revenue sharing or they can actually have stock in T/S. Contributing to T/S is more likely to be one of several projects that a writer is working on, rather than their main source of revenue.

Promoting journalist-reader dialogue

Readers who want to interact with journalists must register and then they can 'follow' their chosen contributors and comment on articles, being drawn into a dialogue. Contributors highlight the user comments that they feel "further the conversation." A selection of these highlighted comments are then be integrated on the home page, amongst contributors' content. Dvorkin believes that this is very important to today's news reader, who enjoys "engaging with and being part of the news life of a professional media person." He believes that the True/Slant environment can be a "powerful experience" in the way that it encourages dialogue between contributors and users, as well as between fellow users.

A voice for advertisers

True/Slant is currently relying on advertising as its sole source of revenue. As well as display advertising, the company is incorporating "a very unique feature" called T/S Ad Slant for corporate marketers. They too can have a voice on True/Slant: they can pay for their own page and have access to the same tools that a contributor has to interact with a community. "It's a more direct and engaging approach," Dvorkin commented. He explained that such pages are integrated into the larger network in a "contextually relevant way," but stressed that the pages are clearly labelled as from marketers. Will this prove more lucrative than traditional advertising?

What's next?

Dvorkin said that the site has plans to grow, hoping to add more contributors and enhance its features. He believes that True/Slant is offering consumers a different way to experience news, one that is "more in line with how they want to access and interpret information today." Breaking news can be found in abundance throughout the web. What readers do need, is experienced, knowledgeable journalists to analyse and explain the news that they find, and this is where True/Slant steps in. It is indeed likely that many readers will appreciate the chance to be part of a conversation and form a relationship with their favourite writers. And from a writer's perspective, considering the growing number of out of work journalists today as traditional media outlets are forced to make cutbacks, a site that provides them with the tools for successful freelancing could be very welcome.

In a joint effort, two News Corp owned groups MySpace and Fox News, are launching uReport, a citizen journalism page where MySpace users can upload photos and videos into several news categories. If the content they submit seems pertinent to Fox News, they may have a chance to be aired on their television channel or FoxNews.com.

Fox News' Digital Vice President Jeff Misenti said "the MySpace uReport community presents an extraordinary opportunity to expand our network of citizen journalists and provides another platform on which FOX News can engage and connect with its fans."

At South by Southwest 2009, the talk entitled 'User Generated Content: State of the Union', was chaired by Chris Tolles of Topix.com, who said that the concept of UGC is "integral" to the Internet. He compared the top 10 sites now with those from 10 years ago, and noted the shift towards user content frameworks such as YouTube and Facebook. With regard to online news publications, the option for users to comment at the end of articles is common practice - although not without its problems.

Todd Morrey of Moss RackSpace's cloud project pointed out that whilst UGC may be all over the Internet, the existence of "mob mentality" results in a reliance "on humans to stay in front of the site and monitor it". This reliance in some ways detracts from the entire focus of UGC, although doesn't detract from its evident popularity. In reference to Obama's much discussed use of social media in his election campaign and inauguration, and the ongoing saga of how to make money from free and user generated online content; Tolles stated "if you can get elected on this stuff, you can certainly make some money from it".

It's a constant theme at the moment, but an important one nonetheless; Twitter as a journalistic tool. The question has been raised once again by Poynter journalist Dave Poulson, who last week followed the Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm's annual state of the state speech.

Whilst watching the speech, Poulson asked his followers if there had been a 'hashtag' created for the event - there had, #MiSOTS (Michigan State of the State).  'Hashtags' are keywords preceeded by a # on a particular topic, and when Tweeters are posting on the said topic they include the 'hashtag' in their post.  This allows other users to search and follow all the Tweets containing it, and effectively join the conversation.  As the speech was ongoing, people watching it were Tweeting their responses and thoughts to the governor's points as she made them.  One journalist said that the responses were helping his journalistic perception of the event by "giving him a feel for how people were reacting to a very critical speech to a very economically depressed state."

Thomson Reuters plans to "roll out a major social media coverage package "to enhance its coverage of the World Economic Forum which begins tomorrow in Davos, Switzerland.  Reporters will use Twitter and YouTube to share video and updates from the Forum. 

According to Mark Jones, global community editor at Thomson Reuters, "We want to turn the coverage around, by asking delegates what they think the biggest issues facing the global economy are, then use social media to let the public offer their opinion."

AfricaNews.com announced the launch of its mobile news website.  According to Bizcommunity, this makes "the company one of the few African media outlets to both source and publish content via mobile devices" and the only one that is dedicated to "broad news in Africa."

Readers can also submit their contributions using the News Tip application.

Editor & Publisher is reporting that the Dallas Morning News has launched a set of community websites.  The sites cover 47 neighborhoods and each one will cover subjects such as hyperlocal news, real estate information, restaurants and gas prices.

The content is generated through Dallas Morning News and from a user-generated content site, neighborsgo.com.

To say the least, 2008 proved a difficult year for newspapers in many nations. Rising printing and distribution costs, waning circulations and fragmented audiences continued to challenge a business model that seems increasingly outdated. And despite many promising advancements made by newspaper companies in Internet and mobile, revenues remain far behind those of print.

But the news is far from all negative. Below is some food for thought for newsroom executives everywhere, ways in which newspapers began adapting to the modern media landscape in 2008 that will continue through 2009.

INTERNET TRENDS BECOMING NEW TOOLS FOR JOURNALISM
2008 saw the continued proliferation of social and professional networking sites Facebook and LinkedIn, with newspapers and journalists, with newspapers and journalists, such as the New York Times well-known columnist Nicholas Kristof, creating their own profiles, applications and connecting with new audiences. User-Generated Content (UGC) continued to gather speed as well, with CNN's iReport in the US and LePost in France among many others around the world. A December report by the Bivings Group also noted that 58% of US newspapers now use some form of UGC.

But the biggest social media revelation to journalists came in the form of 140 characters. The social site, Twitter, which allows users to post short messages for all to see, officially became a widespread tool for journalists in 2008. For example, journalists covering the US Presidential Elections took live notes from conventions and rallies that readers could follow and that also helped to shape those journalists' main story. During the Mumbai terrorist attacks, "tweets", or Twitter messages, appeared as the first news of the attacks. Twitter feeds can also be aggregated, bringing all angles of those covering a certain event into one, comprehensible, instantly-updated record.

Another Internet trend is the "Personalized Web", evoked by newspaper experiments such as MyTimes and start-ups such as Netvibes that provide customizable pages based on RSS feeds and widgets. Arguably the boldest example of personalized news is the BBC's revamped homepage, released in March 2008, which allows users to create their own page based on the BBC information they use most. But personalized news seems to be picking up more slowly than social media. For one thing, Internet users are used to getting the information they seek from many Web pages and may not yet be ready to create their own pages. Secondly, search engines still rule, meaning that traffic to most news sites continues to come through Google, its competitors and their various news and alerts functions. So a customizable homepage like the BBC created, which could ultimately prove a competitor to search engines, remains to become a habit of the general Internet public.  

Personalized news and social media are just two examples of all of the innovation that is occurring in digital media. As technologies continue to rapidly develop, how are journalists and publishers going to keep up? Is it worth learning to use all of these tools if six months down the line they prove to be a fad? Are these technologies hurting or helping newsrooms gather and report news?

Chances are, in 2009 journalists everywhere will continue to experiment with the latest digital fads, and smart newsrooms will set aside R&D funds to play around with new ideas. Who knows? Despite predictions that 2009 will be a difficult year for newspapers, with a lot of hard work, calculated risk and a bit of luck, the industry could find the online golden egg that it has been seeking.

PROLIFERATION OF ONLINE-ONLY NEWS SITES
Perhaps filling in for the difficulties of the print product, more high-profile Internet-based sites began popping up in 2008. Perhaps most notably, The Huffington Post, launched in the summer of 2005, has already jumped to one of the US' top-30 news sites, bolstered by the US Presidential Elections, according to Nielsen Online. Media pundit, entrepreneur and Rupert Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff trumpeted the late-'07 launch of his news aggregator Newser as a "revolution in how people get their news." One year after Wolff's launch, he gained a competitor in Tina Brown, a former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor, who launched her own, rapidly growing online-only site, The Daily Beast, a mixture of aggregated and original articles. And these are only the high-profile, American examples. The relatively low overhead costs of launching an online-based site combined with the ease of aggregating content and news commentary means that this trend will surely continue in 2009. But there is one problem with the sites mentioned above. Aggregation and commentary can only go so far: in an online environment, what happens to the investigative journalism that newspapers have provided for the past two centuries?

NOT-FOR-PROFIT JOURNALISM
Investigative journalism is expensive to produce. Money-wise, it has always been a loss-leader for newspapers. But with modern-day information ubiquity, investigative journalism is just a loss. Whereas once newspapers could claim ownership of a groundbreaking piece and sell papers and advertising around it, now readers are often unaware of the original source of the story they are reading on the Web. So what is going to happen to the type of watchdogging we need for democracy?

Several non-profit start-ups have begun to answer that question. In late 2007, former newspaper editor, Joel Kramer, took his print expertise and moved it online with the launch of the non-profit Minnpost.com. Former WSJ editor Paul Steiger did something similar with ProPublica. The Voice of San Diego, and other similar sites around the US, are making a name for themselves as "serious, original reporting by professional journalists," with the New York Times declaring the sites "stand out" amongst Internet news sites. Crowdsourcing site OfftheBus, a partnership between the Huffington Post and the non-profit NewAssignment.net, helped capture the 2008 Elections and the Knight News Challenge winner Spot.Us is collecting donations from the public to fund investigative stories. Even former Merrill Lynch newspaper analyst Lauren Rich Fine backed the non-profit model in 2008.

With this in mind, are the days of major metropolitan and national newspapers digging up the dirt on businessmen and politicians over? For the time being, no. But newsrooms everywhere are under extreme economic pressures and have been cutting core staff, making it even more difficult for newspapers to conduct the type of investigative journalism their communities need. Don't be surprised if more non-profit (no dividends to shareholders), Internet based (low operating costs) ventures spring up to fill the gaps.

COMPETING NEWSPAPERS PARTNERING UP
As many newspaper newsrooms are cutting staff, wire services should be in greater demand than ever. But 2008 saw a backlash against the world's biggest news agency, the Associated Press, by its members. Several publishers handed in their notice to the non-profit agency partially in response to price hikes and complaining of low value for their money.

In response to the AP mini-exodus, some papers, even those in competition with one another, began joining forces. Papers in Ohio and Florida whose geographical coverage overlaps are swapping stories and even combining bureaux. Not only will this help the papers save money, but it frees up time for reporters to cover issues not being covered elsewhere. In the current economic climate, this trend will continue, but not without its effects on the industry.

Some traditional news hounds would argue that two papers covering similar stories in a certain region add depth and uncover more facts that may otherwise be lost to readers. This may be true. But is it really worth having two reporters on the scene to gather one or two more different pieces of information when there may be other stories elsewhere? And what about the multitude of photojournalists that different organizations send to press conferences and like events where the story subjects don't move much? Is it really worth sending all of those photogs? Couldn't photos just be shared? Without a doubt, these are questions that cash-strapped publishers and editors are asking themselves right now. Expect to see more cross-corporation cooperation in 2009.

IS PRINT REALLY THREATENED?
We've said it before and we'll say it again: print is not going to die. But, considering the trend of the past year, print's reach will be considerably reduced, at least in Western nations.

During the last few months of 2008, publishers' struggle to maintain the high costs of printing and distribution has become apparent. In October, The Christian Science Monitor, a beacon of quality American journalism, announced that it would stop printing its daily edition. In mid-December, the Detroit Free Press, which recently won a broadcast award, decided to limit home delivery to Friday's and weekends while trimming the daily single-copy sale paper to one section. Most recently, the American Society of Newspaper Editors is considering dropping "paper" from its name.

What do these cuts mean for the news"paper" industry? As circulations drop across the Western world, it could mean substantial savings. Weekday papers often make a loss to begin with, so cutting the costs of printing those papers should cover any lost advertising revenue in those same papers.

Perhaps the question publishers should be asking themselves is "Do cutbacks on the paper product matter to readers"? Well, cutbacks will certainly change the face of the newspaper industry. But in the end, media houses are in the news "distribution" business, not the news"paper" business. As long as their news is published, media houses will have completed their service to the public.

"Citizen journalism" may be a misleading label, says NowPublic CEO Leonard Brody. The Web-based Canadian company is involved in "crowdsourced newsgathering" or "participatory journalism" and urges users to publish news stories in numerous formats across different platforms.

"Citizen journalists often have incredible insight and raw, unfiltered, authentic experiences that really add to the content. But where they benefit from a relationship with mainstream media is having journalistic practices and rigor applied to that information so you can have a lot more credibility," said the firm's CMO Michael Tippett. "Conversely, mainstream media benefits from having that kind of material because it provides connection with their communities."

Internet users will be able to send questions to political figures during Democratic and Republican conventions though a project called Digg Dialogg, a joint venture between Digg and CNN.

Questions may be in text or video format and can be transferred through iReport.com, CNN's user-generated content site, or Digg.com. Users can then vote for or "Digg" the questions and the most popular ones would be asked in real interviews that are to be published online.

Source: MediaWeek

Yahoo News Japan reports it has now joined the likes of Wikipedia and Google's Knol in offering user-generated content in its "Editable related section", allowing other readers to suggest and edit material using their "expert knowledge", reports the European Journalism Centre.

The sources may be outside of Yahoo and may even be in other languages. However, Yahoo's influence in Japan implies that the majority of referenced content "is its own anyway".

The way in which Yahoo Japan differs from its US counterparts is that user editors have to apply for the non-paid position and take a test to distinguish the "sheep" from the "goats".

Japan's Yahoo only retains the name in common with US Yahoo.

Source: European Journalism Centre, Tech Radar

See also:

Yahoo! aims to be "number one" independent news source
Opinion: Is Google closer to becoming a media company after releasing Knol
Knol could learn from predecessors

Citizen journalism sites like the Huffington Post's Off The Bus may be in competition as the global user-generated content site Allvoices.com announces the "Excellence in Citizen Media Initiative", a citizen journalism project running until February that will pay US$1,000 for articles that gather 100,000 page views over six months and US$100,000 for those that gather a million page views.

People had stories to tell, but there was no place for them to tell them," says the site's founder Amra Tareen.  "I really wanted to create a discussion around current news and events, a social networking community where anyone could report from anywhere in the world."

Allvoices.com will refrain from promoting political ideas itself and any of the opinions that show up on the site will "emerge organically", according to Portfolio.com.

Tareen mentions that once the website is "better" established the project may be re-launched.

Source: Portfolio.com

Knol, Google's Wikipedia rival, may be inciting fear in media companies as they increasingly begin to see it as a competitor, reported The New York Times (NYT). Knol features user-generated content which authors have control over and which Google may pay for through advertising.

"Google can say they are not in the content business, but if they are paying people and distributing and archiving their work, it is getting harder to make that case," said Jason Calacanis, chief executive of Mahalo, a search engine that employs editors to write on different subjects.

Google will not own the copyright to Knol content and neither will the website contain the Google logo. The company's aim is to guide people towards the "answer" they want and it doesn't intend to own or create any content, said Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker. Knol allows people to create and publish information and the only role that Google has in this is to "organize that information", according to Stricker.

While some people like Wenda Harris Millard, co-chief executive of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, worry about the bias of Google search results, Stricker said that if Knol pages do rank high, it is because they "earned their position", reported the New York Times.

Calacanis expressed concern about Google overtaking search results, which may "alienate Web publishers that are Google's advertising partners" although Google might not actually "artificially favor its sites", reported the NYT.

Google currently owns YouTube, blogging service Blogger and Usenet archives, a digital discussion board collection that is older than the Web. Google also digitalizes books that show up on search results as well as containing stories from the Associated Press in its Google News service and publishing stock market information on Google Finance.

Source: NYT

See also:
Google launches paid Wikipedia alternative