The BBC says it is likely to extend the life on an experimental team which is pioneering the way breaking news is being covered in the wake of the London bombings.
The user generated content hub (UGCH) was launched in May when the existing Have Your Say team, responsible for public submissions to the news website, was joined by producers from News 24, Radio Five Live and newsgathering for a three month trial.
Citizen-journalism was deemed to have ‘come of age’ on the 7th July when bombers struck London – with people sending still pictures and video footage shot on mobile phones to established media outlets. On July 7 the public sent more than 20,000 emails, 1000 images and 3000 text messages to the BBC.
In a statement published on the BBC Intranet today, Pete Clifton, Editor of News Interactive, said:
"Reader contributions have not been a sideshow, they have been at the heart of our coverage. The hub’s key task is to push this material more efficiently around BBC news. It will probably always be impossible to completely marshal the user content we get , but this has been a real step towards us bringing more order to the material we receive."
The Corporation says the new status of user generated content came home on July 8 when the Six O’Clock News ran the first package to be entirely composed of images taken by members of the public, who filmed the aftermath of the bombs.
However, in one of his editorials, Clifton also defended the BBC's appeal for contributions from citizen-journalists:
"A number of you have written to say you are disgusted that we are openly asking for pictures from readers when bombs have gone off. We could be encouraging people to take undue risks to get the pictures, or to invade the privacy of the injured and traumatised."
"We will apply the same editorial guidelines to these images as for any other, and if we feel they are too graphic or intrusive, we won't use them. I certainly don't want people taking risks or behaving insensitively to get the images on our behalf, but I believe the images we used show we can meet those guidelines and make sensible use of material the readers want to share with us. "
It's an example of the cunundrum that citizen-journalism in the big media can pose. Contributions need to be edited, filtered and subjected to the same editorial critera as contributions made by paid journalists.
The debates around this have been raging and some examples include posts by Leonard King who writes:
"During research for an assignment last year I came across this article that proffered an argument that the proliferation of capturing devices such as camera phones would assist us to cross reference, taking away the power of the digital image to be easily manipulated."
The Online Journalism Review also picks through the issues. And The Observer newspaper published this article which has wide range of examples of the practical applications for citizien snappers. They include the peoples' paparazzi, phone-camera footage being broadcast by the BBC’s Crimewatch programme as part of a murder inquiry, and a man who was bitten by an unidentified spider and given the correct antidote when doctors sent of pictures from his phone to experts at Bristol zoo.
Matt
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