#12 - Article - The rise and rise of UGC

Key points from the article "Is reality becoming more real? The rise and rise of UGC"

Now new technologies mean that the audience are no longer passive receivers of news.

We are in the era of user generated content (UGC) where the old divide between institution and audience is being eroded.

Key to this change has been the development of new technologies such as video phones and the growth of the internet and user-dominated sites.

1991 - Video cameras had become more common and more people could afford them…unfortunately for four Los Angeles police officers. King’s beating would be just another hidden incident with no consequences.

This was one of the first examples of the news being generated by ‘ordinary people,’ now commonly known as ‘citizen journalists’, ‘grassroots journalists’, or even ‘accidental journalists’.
Most news organisations include formats for participation: message boards, chat rooms, Q&A, polls, have your says, and blogs with comments enabled.

The natural disaster of the Asian Tsunami on December 26th 2004 was another turning point for UGC. Much of the early footage of events was provided from citizen journalists, or ‘accidental journalists,’ providing on-the-spot witness accounts of events as they unfolded.

A second terrible event, the London bombings on July 5th 2005, provided another opportunity for citizen journalists to influence the mainstream news agenda. No one was closer to events than those caught up in the bombings, and the footage they provided from their mobile phones was raw and uncompromising.

23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho, an undergraduate at Virginia Tech. Between his first attack, when he shot two people, going on to kill a further 30 people. Rather than concentrate on saving his own life, Jamal Albarghouti recorded events from his position lying on the ground near the firing. The footage, available on YouTube and CNN brought events home to a worldwide audience.

Twitter and flickr came to the forefront during the Mumbai bombings in India in late November 2008.

You can send in as much UGC to the major news organisations as you want, with no guarantee that any of it will ever be aired. The blogosphere, for example, provides an opportunity for independent, often minority and niche views and news to reach a wide audience.

The change in the landscape of the news means that groups who had little access to self-representation before, such as youth groups, low income groups, and various minority groups may, through citizen journalism, begin to find that they too have a voice.

It is likely that in future there will be fewer and fewer permanent trained staff at news organisations, leaving a smaller core staff who will manage and process UGC from citizen journalists, sometimes known as ‘crowd sourcing.’