The recent controversy over premium rate phone in votes to television programmes in the UK not being tallied properly underlines the point that audiences will eventually question, then turn against, participation for participation’s sake. The programmes in question, where audience members voted for or against on screen contestants by the million, were primarily entertainment and quiz shows but perhaps the news industry should take note too.

Over the past few years, and more so now than ever before, just about everyone in the news and media industries argues that interactivity, audience contributions, participatory journalism, audience communities and “user generated content” are inherently and unquestionably good. Those who don’t make those arguments are, increasingly, being said to “not get it”.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of people creating and sharing stuff online and I do believe that, in some instances, it IS a good thing for news and media organisations to point to or use this stuff in their reporting of stories. But, sadly, I think we get it wrong a lot more often than we get it right.

But user generated content isn’t free – it takes editorial and technical infrastructure to ingest, manage, store and display. Simply adding feedback form at the bottom of every news article, or advertising an email address for people to submit photos (of what? why??), may have results that are far from “good”. Those who take the time and effort, sometimes even incur a cost, to submit this content expect it to be used. The staff at the receiving end are often under-resourced to the point that they don’t have time to even look at all the stuff that does come in, much less thank everyone who made a submission or alert everyone whose content has been used. This sort of user generated content collection is devoid of editorial purpose, wastes resources and provides those who do choose to “participate” with a poor experience.

The costs of providing a good experience to the audience must be weighed against the potential value to the, often much larger, non-contributing audience (and anyway, how do we know for sure that the second of these audience types actually like audience contributions?). It also needs to be looked at alongside other possible uses of scarce editorial resource: a person sifting through emails, often following an untargetted call to action, is a person who can’t be utilised on other tasks like investigating, interviewing or reporting.

What I’m saying is this:

1) User generated content, participation, or whatever else you want to call it isn’t all equal, nor is it unquestionably “good”

2) Resources spent ingesting, managing, storing and displaying user generated content are resources that could have been utilised on other tasks

3) Empty calls to action lead to disappointment amongst those who contribute and simply waste resources within the news organisation

For news and media organisations to do user generated content well, they need to ensure:

1) That they make good calls to action which lead to a high signal-to-noise ratio, where the majority of content submitted is focused and editorially relevant

2) That their efforts are well enough resourced so that everyone who does submit content, even if it isn’t used, feels that their participation has been valued

3) That the content collected from the audience is actually useful in telling the story rather than simply gratuitous attempts to run a tally of “participatory actions” amongst audience members

Let’s not let what happened in entertainment television happen to those of us who work in other areas of the media and news industries. It’s about time we learned that it’s not participation that is good, not contribution numbers that count, but that our calls to action were made for a clear editorial gain and that those who did choose to participate were provided with a positive experience when doing so.

Anything less betrays our audience and will, in time, erode their trust in us.

[Disclaimer: This post, like everything on this blog, is my personal opinion and not that of my employer.]