The rise of UGC

1.       What is meant by the term ‘citizen journalist’?

This is when public citizens play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing and circulating news and information.

2.       What was one of the first examples of news being generated by ‘ordinary people’?

One of the first examples was a homemade video of four police officers in the U.S that had just caught Rodney King who was African American after a high speed chase. The officers surrounded the man, tasered him and beat him with clubs. This was then shown on prime time news as the video went viral and became an international media sensation. This was then a focus for complaints against the police officers being racist towards African-Americans.  Due to this video, riots were caused and there was a huge civil unrest known as the LA riots; this went on for 6 days, 53 people died and around 4000 were injured.  This was all generated by an ordinary person.

3.       List some of the formats for participation that are now offered by news organisations.

UGC

·         message boards

·         chat rooms

·         Question and Answer

·         Polls

·         Have your says

·         Blogs with comments enabled

·         Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, Myspace, YouTube and news sites such as Wikipedia

4.       What is one of the main differences between professionally shot footage and that taken first hand (UGC)?

First hand footage is harder hitting and emotive rather than professionally shot footage. It is a way for people to tell their own stories and to show the harsh reality of current news such as disasters like Tsunamis. The audience can then see unmediated footage on the news. Perhaps the news now seems old fashioned and somehow staged if it lacks the raw, grainy, low quality footage provided by citizen journalists.

5.       What is a gatekeeper?

Gatekeeping is the process through which information is filtered for dissemination, whether for publication, broadcasting, the internet, or some other mode of communication. Such as editors of a newspaper, they decide what gets to be printed and shown to the public.

6.       .How has the role of gatekeeper changed?

Gatekeeping has changed as now individuals can use as much user generated content as they want and can send it to news institutions such as the BBC. The independent media on the web is a way to get around the gatekeepers as niche views and minority groups can use UGC to post up whatever they like and share their opinions using blogs or social media sites. Therefore the groups who had little access to self-representation before can now through citizen journalism begin to find they have a voice too.

7.       What is one of the primary concerns held by journalists over the rise of UGC?

Journalists fear their jobs as everyone is producing their content. They believe in the future there will be fewer trained staff in news organisations as the job is already being done for them. Leaving core staff to manage and process UGC from citizen journalists. Some believe that mediators and moderators may disappear too leaving the world unmediated as sites could be overrun if they are not mediated. It could be dominated by free speech of racism and all sorts which is a massive negative.