The power of user gen content at the beeb

Peter Horrocks has an interesting post on the BBC editors site which seems to have got a lot of reaction.

Ten days ago, just hours after the death of Benazir Bhutto, we considered turning off the comment recommendation facility on that story on the BBC News website. It was only a fleeting suggestion but that we could consider, however briefly, freezing this important part of BBC News’ service tells you something about the power and the potential danger of the new intensity of the interaction between the contributing public, journalists and audiences. And it raises the question of how much attention and resource news organisations should devote to this rapidly burgeoning aspect of our journalism.

The reason was that the site was bombarded by what can only be described as anti Muslim and religion comments

The top 20 or 30 recommended posts all had variations on the theme, attacking Islam in comprehensive terms. Most of them weren’t making distinctions between different aspects of Islam, they were simply damning the religion as a whole.

But

Buried amongst the comments however, rarely recommended by others, were insights from those who had met Benazir or knew her. And there were valuable eyewitness comments from people who were at the scene in Rawalpindi. Our team that deals with user content sifted through the chaff to find some excellent wheat.


The power of user generated content and Peter describes the current reorganisation of the BBC newsroom

Within the multimedia newsroom department, for which I have responsibility, we are now preparing a major physical re-organisation to accompany the structural changes. All of the key daily news teams in radio, TV and the web will be seated alongside each other next to the people who run the newsgathering. And close to the middle of that operation will be our User Generated Content unit. It will be right alongside the newsgathering teams that deploy our conventional journalistic resources. And the UGC team will be deploying and receiving our unconventional journalistic resources – information and opinion from the audience.

Perhaps evidence ,if anymore were needed ,that the Beeb is taking seriously the advent of the citizen journalist