The Rise and Rise of UGC
· Big institutions used to create and broadcast news to a passive a receptive audience
· New technology means audiences are no longer passive
· Audiences become users and users become publishers
o Old division between institution and audience eroded
· Key to change = video phones, growth of internet, user dominated sites
· “Citizen Journalist”
· 1991 – Police caught a guy called Rodney King and beat him up, it was filmed by an onlooker
o Racism issues and caused civil unrest
o Started LA riots
o (video recording by onlookers much more common)
§ Footage easier to upload to internet
· UGC; plays role in aspects of media
o Participation in news orgs
§ Message boards
§ Chat rooms
§ Q&A
§ Polls
§ Blogs with comments
· Social media sites – based around UGC
o Bebo
o MySpace
o Youtube
o Facebook
· People turn to UGC to access news
o Wikipedia News
o Google News
o YouTube
· Asian Tsunami (December 26th 2004) – Turning point for UGC
o Earlier footage – provided by citizens/”accidental journalists”
o Later – social networking sites provided witness accounts and acted as a forum for people to share their experiences
· London Bombings (July 5th 2005)
o Footage from mobile phones uncompromising
o First hand view
· People have desires to tell their own stories and have their own moment of fame
o May be the cause of the popularity of Facebook, etc
· However, also has more negative outcomes:
o Package of writngs, videos, photos from Seung Hui Cho – Virginia Tech massacre
o Provided evidence and showed the account from his point of view
· Twitter and Flickr came to forefront during Mumbai Bombings in India (late November 2008)
o Bombs went off through city = worlds media got up to date with events through reports on Twitter and Flickr
§ But seen as controversial
· As they were broadcasting their tweets, people may have been putting their lives at risk
· Also on Twitter: Hudson River Plane Crash (January 15th 2009
o Dramatic picture of plane half sinking in the river with passengers crowded of wing waiting to be rescued
§ Janis Krun tweeted:
§ “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on a ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”
· Therefore it was this citizen journalist – empowered by social networking sites – that first broke this story.
Gatekeepers
· They still fulfil their old function of decided what is and isn’t news and what will and won’t be broadcast
· You can send as much UGC to major news organisations as you want, but there will be no guarantee that it will be aired.
· The way around gatekeepers is with independent media on the web
o Blogosphere
§ Opportunity for niche views and for it to reach a wide audience
· The change in the landscape of the news means that groups who had little access before may gain a voice through citizen journalism
Professionals
· It’s likely that in the future there will be fewer permanent trained staff at news organisations
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