The BBC’s User Generated Content (UGC) Hub does not further meaningful civil participation in the news, and the routine inclusion of UGC does not significantly alter news selection criteria or editorial values. So concludes Jackie Harrison’s study on audience contributions and gatekeeping practices at the BBC.

The study found many of the previous barriers to news selection have been removed or are not applicable to UGC.

“User generated content has been absorbed into BBC newsroom practices and is now routinely considered as an aspect of, or dimension to, many stories. In this sense the traditional barriers which formed the gatekeeping criteria of the 1990s have been altered forever.”

Harrison sees the changes to selection criteria as a real and worrying threat to quality and standards at the public broadcaster. Her study raises interesting questions about the value of UGC and how it should be measured. She fears the growing tendency to utilise audience content, often for convenience, risks an increase in “soft news” at the expense of quality journalism, and worse, the degradation of public knowledge.

Harrison does not see the hub as progressing civil debate or public engagement on a meaningful level, and she anticipates future use of UGC may grow more opportunistic. This is obviously at odds with the active debate and participation the hub set out to foster, and which has dominated previous ideals of audience participation.

Selection and moderation

In an earlier study, Harrison looked at what caused some stories to be used by the BBC and others to be rejected. Here she reinvestigates these reasons in the context of UGC, finding that in many cases UGC can, if not make these previous concerns irrelevant, make the case for automatic rejection less compelling.

While the hub is subject to resource-intensive moderation and methodical processes to ascertain UGC authenticity and quality it is, like all news organisations, still learning how to most effectively utilise audience participation.

There are growing and unresolved tensions for journalists in balancing the BBC’s traditional journalistic standards while fostering open communication, promoting free speech, and at the same time protecting the site and the audience against possible offence.

Inevitably, this gives rise to judgement calls which are necessarily subjective.

Harris suggests two questions then arise from this:

• Does UGC reflect public opinion and
  
• two, are they simply generating noise…of little value, and,
• is it a public service broadcaster’s job to provide a platform for all sorts of views including unpalatable or unpleasant ‘‘non-majoritarian’’ comment and, if it is not, why not?

BBC journalists told Harrison, “The difficulty with opening up the floodgates to participation is that ‘the full spectrum” of opinions must be considered to further the aims of the ‘global conversation’.”

Should we be concerned, as Harrison seems to be, that material gathered at the hub is not always deemed of particular quality? Or does the value, as Stuart Purvis suggests, lie in the telling, the fact that new and possibly previously unheard voices are given a platform?

We are right to expect quality content from the public broadcaster, but opinions on what that means differ widely.

This can be seen in the debate between Paul Bradshaw and his students, and the BBC staff regarding UGC content and external links. It seems while hub head Matthew Eltringham spoke about the relevance of content, what he was really talking about was quality content. If the BBC opened up linking to contributors’ sites, would it have to do it for all contributors, and what kinds of complications would this pose?

The future of UGC

Perhaps we should not be viewing the growing tendency for “soft journalism” through UGC as a degradation in quality, but part of the evolution of the BBC. Unless of course, it does come at the cost of investigative, serious journalism, which clearly the BBC has a mandate to invest in.

Harrison rightly points out the hub is only one part of the newsroom, but a part that is increasingly relied upon as an additional source of information, shared between departments at the BBC.

What the study doesn’t address is how successful the UGC hub has been in engaging people who have previously not interacted with the BBC, or who have not taken part in public debate in general. I suspect it is unlikely to have encouraged society’s voiceless. We must assume at the least, that people taking part have access to technology, which is of course, one of the major difficulties of the idea of the new electronic, egalitarian public sphere.

The hub does represent a deliberate and conscious effort to seek audience interaction and better serve the public interest, though what this will mean for the BBC, and for the public, in the long-term is still unclear.

It will be interesting to see how the hub develops and where UGC can go. Is Harrison right in predicting it will grow more meaningless or, more drastically, has meaningful civil engagement in the news already met its untimely death, as Steve Borris declared?

Last week I took a group of MA Online Journalism students to visit the BBC’s User Generated Content Hub. It was a hugely informative conversation about how the biggest team of its kind in the world manages an enormous flow of texts, comments, images and other media (If you want to see more, Caroline Beavon has video of the whole thing, while I recorded a couple of Audioboos answering questions posed via Twitter).

As we were discussing the changing nature of the hub – it is increasingly looking to engage with users beyond the core BBC audience – it became apparent that there is a paradox at the heart of what the BBC does here – and by extension, any UGC effort. And it’s a paradox around objectivity and neutrality.

I’ve often felt that the BBC is slightly hamstrung in its social media efforts by its requirement to remain objective. Objectivity makes it harder to stimulate conversations. You can start them – but once they get going, you have to remain on the sidelines, expressing no opinion either way.

I’ve written before on how online journalists should be a mix of the ideal party host and ideal party guest. Staying on the sidelines allows you to play the host, but restricts your ability to truly perform the ‘guest’ role.

The Switzerland of social media

But what I realised during this visit was that objectivity also makes it easier to attract contributions in the first place. Striving to remain neutral in any conversation means that (most) people see your space as ‘safe’ for whatever they have to contribute.

Carrying the analogy further, in this case the BBC is like a warehouse party where the host has gathered an enormous crowd but you’re not entirely sure who they are or whether they like you.

Perhaps the problem here is the catch-all phrase ‘UGC’ (which the BBC’s Matthew Eltringham dislikes). The BBC is perhaps better positioned than any other news organisation to act as a focal point for certain types of UGC – raw footage, witness texts and other generic news event-related other material – largely because it strives to achieve a neutral position.

On the other hand, organisations with a defined ideological leaning have an advantage in other types of UGC- for example, ‘sticky’ conversation such as comment threads – because they can lay their cards on the table, get stuck in and inspire the sorts of strong reactions that stimulate debate.

The BBC, for those types of content, is reliant on users to perform that role.

In short, it’s an ecosystem with a place for both the BBC and news organisations on all points of the political spectrum.

To simplify enormously, the BBC’s objectivity gives it an advantage as a neutral ground for submitting content; left- or right-leaning news websites have an advantage in being able to stir opinion – but they will always have a smaller audience for that.

Enormous thanks to Matthew Eltringham and Trushar Barot for welcoming the students to the BBC, as well as their conversation and insights.

Here’s another draft section from the book chapter on UGC I’m currently writing I’ve written which I’d welcome your input on. I’m particularly interested in any other objectives you can think of that news organisations have for using UGC – or the strategies adopted to achieve those.

A common mistake made when first venturing into user generated content is to focus on the technology, rather than the reasons for using it. “We need to have our own social network!” someone shouts. But why? And, indeed, how do you do so successfully?

A useful framework to draw on when thinking about how you approach UGC is the POST process for social media strategy outlined by Forrester Research (Bernoff, 2007). This involves identifying:

1. People: who are your audience (or intended audience), and what social media (e.g. Facebook, blogs, Twitter, forums, etc.) do they use? Equally important, why do they use social media?
2. Objectives: what do you want to achieve through using UGC
3. Strategy: how are you going to achieve that? How will relationships with users change?
4. Technology: only when you’ve explored the first three steps can you decide which technologies to use

Some common objectives for UGC and strategies associated with those are listed below:

Can you add any more? What strategies have you used around UGC?

UPDATE: ‘Pursue the goal, not the method‘ by Chris Brogan puts this concept well in broader terms.

The following is a brief section from a book I’m writing I’ve written on online journalism. I’m publishing it here to invite your thoughts on anything you think I might be missing…

There is a long history of audience involvement in news production, from letters to the editor and readers’ photos, to radio and television phone-ins, and texts from viewers being shown at the bottom of the screen.

For many producers and editors, user generated content is seen – and often treated – as a continuation of this tradition. However, there are two key features of user generated content online that make it a qualitatively different proposition.

Firstly, unlike print and broadcast, on the web users do not need to send something to the mainstream media for it to be distributed to an audience: a member of the public can upload a video to YouTube with the potential to reach millions. They can share photos with people all over the world. They can provide unedited commentary on any topic they choose, and publish it, regularly, on a forum or blog.

Quite often they are simply sharing with an online community of other people with similar interests. But sometimes they will find themselves with larger audiences than a traditional publisher because of the high quality of the material, its expertise, or its impact.

Indeed, one of the challenges for media organisations is to find a way to tap into blog platforms, forums, and video and photo sharing websites, rather than trying to persuade people to send material to their news websites as well. For some this has meant setting up groups on the likes of Flickr, LinkedIn and Facebook to communicate with users on their own territory.

The second key difference with user generated content online is that there are no limitations on the space that it can occupy. Indeed, whole sites can be given over to your audience and, indeed, are. The Telegraph, Sun and Express all host social networks where readers can publish photos and blog posts, and talk on forums. The Guardian’s CommentIsFree website provides a platform where dozens of non-journalist experts blog about the issues of the day. And an increasing number of regional newspapers provide similar spaces for people to blog their analysis of local issues under their news brand, while numerous specialist magazines host forums with hundreds of members exchanging opinions and experiences every day. On the multimedia side, Sky and the BBC provide online galleries where users can upload hundreds of photos and videos.

The term User Generated Content itself is perhaps too general a term to be particularly useful to journalists. It can refer to anything from a comment posted by a one-time anonymous website visitor, to a 37-minute documentary that one of your readers spent ten years researching. The most accurate definition might simply be that user generated content is “material your organisation has not commissioned and paid for”. In which case, most of the time when we’re talking about UGC,we need to talk in more specific terms.

The Guardian has more URLs bookmarked on Delicious than any other UK newspaper, as I first revealed here (with the original video here)

There are 10,914 Guardian URLs bookmarked, with the Times coming 2nd (3,944) and the Independent in 3rd place (3,196).

Quarkbase must be using the Delicious API but it doesn’t say where it gets the number. Click the papers’ name to see the Quarkbase figures (and more).

The leaked DNA test on 13-year-old alleged dad Alfie Patten has revealed a big problem with court-ordered reporting restrictions in the internet age. (NB This is a cut down version of a much longer original post on blogging and reporting restrictions that was featured on the Guardian).

Court orders forbidding publication of certain facts apply only to people or companies who have been sent them. But this means there is nothing to stop bloggers publishing material that mainstream news organisations would risk fines and prison for publishing.

Even if a blogger knows that there is an order, and so could be considered bound by it, an absurd catch 22 means they can’t found out the details of the order – and so they risk contempt of court and prison.

Despite the obvious problem the Ministry of Justice have told me they have no plans to address the issue.

Who is covered – and why bloggers aren’t

Court orders set out who is covered: “Who is bound: This order binds all persons and all companies (whether acting by their directors, employees or agents or in any other way) who know that the order has been made.”

You are only bound by it if you know what it says. There is a standard procedure for alerting most news organisations of a court order. But the orders aren’t automatically sent to anyone else. And so no one else is bound by them.

In particular, a blogger who picked up the initial Mirror story with the DNA test results (now the subject of reporting restrictions) and repeated it would not be banned from doing so, unless they had seen the court order (which they generally wouldn’t have done).

What is banned – and why you can’t find out

This is what the order bans: “Publishing restrictions: This Order prohibits the publishing or broadcasting in any newspaper, magazine, public computer network, internet website, sound or television broadcast or cable or satellite programme service of [the details of the reporting restrictions are then given in paragraph 3].”

I can’t tell you the details as the Order also says that “no publication of the text or a summary of this Order except for service of the Order … shall include any of the matters referred to in paragraph 3 [ie the specific details of what you're not allowed to publish]“.

And this is the other big part of the problem – there is no way of an ordinary blogger finding out the details of the order, as the order bans publication of itself. Even if you know there is a court order, you can’t find out what you’re not allowed to say. (I only know as I managed to get a copy of it from a national newspaper – something no ordinary blogger could do.)

What this means for bloggers

So there are two problems:

* Bloggers aren’t bound by the order unless they know it exists.
* If they know it exists, they have no way to find exactly what it says – so they can’t tell what they’re allowed to say and what they aren’t.

I asked Struan Robertson, Legal Director at Pinsent Masons and editor of out-law.com, what all this meant for bloggers.

His reply is an alarming one for people who want to write about areas covered by reporting restrictions: “Bloggers can be caught by the law of contempt as being publishers – it doesn’t just apply to mainstream newspapers. Therefore, as soon as they become aware of it, they should remove any postings, by themselves or their readers, that breach the terms of the Order – even if they know only the general purpose of the Order and not its exact detail.” (My emphasis.)

Personally, I find this worrying – a system that stops people publishing facts, but makes it impossible to find out what they can and can’t publish, is not a good one.

The Ministry of Justice view

The Ministry of Justice could see the problem when I spoke to them. I asked how bloggers were supposed to find out what they can and can’t say – and they said that, while they were looking into a database of reporting restrictions for journalists, there would not be one for bloggers to consult because of the “real problem” that it would reveal the very facts that were supposed to be being restricted.

The spokesman said: “It is the responsibility of those reporting cases … to ensure that no reporting restrictions apply. The maximum penalty for contempt of court is 2 years.”

But he conceded this left bloggers in a ‘catch 22′ – bound by court orders they have no way of accessing the details of.

Conclusion

Obviously, reporting restrictions are important and should be obeyed. But the current system hasn’t really kept up with technology.

The obvious answer is a database of reporting restrictions – this doesn’t have to give so much detail that it would become virtually an edition of the News of the World (‘you are not allowed to report that X is having an affair with Y’). In this case, it would have just needed to say that you are not allowed to give the results of the DNA test.

There are no plans for such a database – so we’re left in the ridiculous position that bloggers are encouraged to check the reporting restrictions to avoid contempt of court … but are left with no way to do the checks.

And how come Google news is still getting away with it?

None of this explains why Google News is still allowed to show headlines from non-UK news sources that give the results of the DNA test if you do a search on Alfie Patten. (And the longer version of this article has an interview with the blogger who broke that story, Martin Belam).

If the current system hasn’t even realised that Google News exists, what hope is there of it dealing with individual bloggers?

Lesson 4 in this series of Online Journalism classes looks at User Generated Content (UGC) and Citizen Journalism. Now the students have to think creatively of ways to engage communities in the issues they’re covering (and vice versa):

The Sun has had more stories submitted to Fark, the social news site for stranger news stories, than any other UK newspaper. That may be no surprise, but it’s the Guardian wot’s runner up.

The news follows the discovery that the Guardian is top at Reddit, the Times at StumbleUpon, and the Telegraph at Digg.

The graph is based on an analysis of the total submissions for each newspaper site to Fark. It shows that, just as with those other social news sites, the FT, Mirror and Express are trailling in last.

Sun winning at Fark, Guardian second

The Guardian has had more stories submitted to Reddit.com than any other major newspaper site.

The news follows the Telegraph topping the Digg list and the Times topping the StumbleUpon list.

The graph shows how many pages have been submitted to Reddit for each site. It’s based on an analysis of newspapers’ Reddit submissions that also suggests the Telegraph is catching up with the Guardian – they tied for the number of stories submitted over the last week.

Submissions to Reddit: Guardian wins

The more interesting of the sessions at the BBC’s Future of Journalism conference came on the second day.

Head of BBC Newsroom Peter Horrocks spent most of his session fielding questions from employees concerned about how their particular corner of the corporation would be affected by multimedia newsrooms. That aside, general themes from his presentation and responses to questions included:

• a need for a broader range of skills, such as information design and software development
• While strong single-platform performers will be encouraged to continue doing well on that platform, everyone else will be encouraged to work across platforms
• a need to reach audiences the BBC (and other news organisations) are struggling to engage with, particularly young C2 audiences

User generated content

The second panel, on user generated content, was probably the most interesting of the two days – mainly because it was also the most diverse, including Sky’s Simon Bucks and Paul Hambleton from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation alongside BBC Sport Online’s Claire Stocks, Matthew Eltringham from the BBC’s UGC hub, and Chris Russell from Future Media and Technology.

Claire Stocks presented a ‘before and after’ view of UGC on the BBC Sport site, and noted how popular the banter was proving as part of live text commentary (which is itself hugely popular). There was now greater integration of video but she felt they could present the information better.

Chris Russell showed a rather nice visualisation of a UGC ‘continuum’ which highlighted where the BBC was doing a lot (comments, on demand) and where they were doing too little (voting, tagging and ‘collective experience’).

Simon Bucks and Matthew Eltringham both showed the importance of UGC in generating leads. When Somali pirates seized the Sirius Star, for example, UGC led to the BBC finding out the name of a crew member, his friends and details of his family. Comments on the Sky website, meanwhile, led to an expert writing a blog post about the Star. It was also comments on a Sky web chat that led to journalists reporting on the story of a couple divorcing in Second Life.

An injection of reality was provided by Paul Hambleton, however, who presented research which showed journalists’ expectations of news consumption moving from television and print to web and mobile were vastly different from consumers’ expectations of their own behaviour (while 96% of journalists thought viewers would read more online, around two thirds of viewers felt their behaviour would change in this way). There was a similar disparity between the value consumers placed on categories such as user generated content and investigative journalism, and the value journalists placed on the same (generally higher).

I’ll try to post some reflections from the rest of the day – particularly the data driven journalism sessions I was involved in – at a later point. If you attended the conference or watched the live intranet stream, let me know what you took from it.