Week Three: User-Generated Content And The Changing News Cycle

This week’s reading, written by Stephen Quinn and Deirdre Quinn-Allan, explores the various ways and methods that the average citizen can contribute to the news ‘cycle’.

The article looks at different forms of technology that not only can help ‘citizen journalism’ to thrive, but can assist journalists in reaching wider audiences. These include the use of mobile phones to transmit photos and video to newsrooms via the internet, as well as the production of blogs, moblogs (blogs designed to work with mobile phones), v-logs (video blogs), wikis (collaborated pages of information on internet site Wikipedia), and podcasts.

The London bombings of 2005 and the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004 were pivotal moments in the interest of ‘citizen journalism’ and the content that was produced by people that just happened to be in the right place at the right time (or the wrong place in the wrong time when you really think about the situations that occurred). According to the article, the BBC and other news organizations were inundated with messages, photos, film footage, information and real-life accounts after the tragedies, leading the newsroom to create a special position for three journalists (later eight) to deal with the thousands of news items that were sent in daily.

Of course with this are issues of authenticity but that’s only to be expected. It’s up to the journalists to sift through the information received and find the real story. Unfortunately, because of time-constraints, some journalists may sometimes overlook or not double-check all the facts, carrying over the mistake onto their publication. This is just one of the drawbacks of allowing user-generated content into the news.

However, it seems that user-generated content will continue to be a strong addition to news-gathering in the media playground. As technology gets greater and more accessible, citizen journalism will only continue to grow.