User-generated only gets you so far
November 28th, 2007 — Dave Peters
Who knew? Good local news coverage that people want to read depends on good journalism.
Steve Outing, proponent of citizen journalism and columnist for Editor and Publisher, shares an excellent cautionary tale about his experience relying on user-generated content to create a business.
The idea seemed solid: Create a site centered on an expert contributor (say, a climbing enthusiast who knows what she’s talking about and can write informatively) but count on energetic climbers out there to jump in and provide lots of great content. Read Steve’s post because I’m glossing over details, but fundamentally, the user-generated stuff as a whole just wasn’t good enough or consistent enough to attract a big enough audience to make a business. Too much crap, not enough real information that readers found worthwhile.
It will be a while before the primordial ooze of user-generated content evolves into a living, breathing reliable news provider without a strong framework of people who are paid to find stuff out and tell the world about it.
The number of people systematically gathering news in an organized fashion matters. Having thousands of user/gatherers out there sending comments, photos, videos, documents and more is a tremendous opportunity. But that mass needs help. As the economic model crumbles for old-fashioned newspapers and TV stations, the old-fashioned gatherers, writers, choosers and filterers continue to have value.
November 28th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
A lot of news organizations are currently obsessed with UGC, because the idea of having users provide free, relevant content to your site is almost irresistible.
But the truth that no one wants to see is that the percentage of useful to junk content is no higher in UGC than it is with professional journalists. A few people can write compelling, entertaining and useful entries. The problem is that you have to wade through a lot of garbage to find the gems.
The under-appreciated aspect of journalism is that a good editor does the weeding out before the reader ever sees the garbage. Most UGC-oriented sites rely on random selections and group voting to increase the odds you can find the gems. But even on a mega-successful site such as YouTube, most videos have only been viewed a few hundred times.
Talent is always scarce, whether you’re getting it for free and paying a full-time salary. Or to put it another way, not everyone can put together a video of a water-skiing squirrel.
December 1st, 2007 at 1:49 am
A lot of hooplah with little dose of reality.
At the ILM:07 UGC panel there was a lot of ‘wooo we can just sit back, prop our feet up on our desk, and watch the billions roll in’. I did ask a question which asked if this view wasn’t rather naive and how they were going to get users actually participating.
I got a nice canned response from Local.com about aggregation of data which had nothing to do with my question. No one really has a clue about UGC (except perhaps Yelp, and even that is very arguable).