Earlier today, Peter Horrocks, the Head of BBC Newsroom, gave a presentation at the Broadcast News and the Active Citizen conference taking place at the University of Leeds Institute of Communication Studies. His full presentation has subsequently been posted on the BBC News Editors blog. I’ve excerpted some of the bits I find most interesting below.
Horrocks revealed that, in the immediate aftermath of the death of Benazir Bhutto, BBC News considered turning off the comments but, in the end, were pleased that they hadn’t,
"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. To be honest it was pretty boring
wading through them and wouldn’t have added much to anyone’s
understanding of the causes or consequences of the assassination.
Buried amongst the comments however, rarely recommended by others, were
insights from those who had met Benazir or knew her. And there were
valuable eye witness 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."
Horrocks went on to explain that he, and others, within BBC News need to be careful when evaluating the place of "user generated content" in the way they report and edit the news,
"I begin with this salutary tale not because I wish to undermine the
significance of public contribution to journalism on the BBC. We have
already invested significantly in it and have plans for much more,
which I will outline later. But I want to argue that the somewhat
messianic and starry-eyed way in which public participation journalism
is argued for needs some very careful consideration. And there are many
different aspects of such journalism, with varying degrees of value."
Audience content will, Horrock’s says, be near the centre of the multi-media news gathering operation at the BBC,
"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."
Horrocks splits audience contributions into three categories:
- eyewitness accounts, photos and other content submitted as news breaks
- stories we’re alerted to by audience members (or, increasingly, by people posting their thoughts on sites like twitter or on blogs)
- audiences who contribute information to an emerging story when asked to do so by a journalist following a hunch
Although BBC News can get 10 – 20,000 emails and messages a day, this still only, Horrocks says, represents around 1% of the audience and it would be unwise to allow it to alter the news agenda. He says,
"Rather than playing a numbers game to drive our agenda I instead
encourage our teams to look for thoughtful or surprising views and
opinions. In other words we still need to be journalistic with this
material, as we would with any other source…… We need to be able to extract real editorial value from such
contributions more easily. We are exploring as many technological
solutions as we can for filtering the content, looking for intelligent
software that can help journalists find the nuggets and ways in which
the audience itself can help us to cope with the volume and sift it……If we can free up effort from simply processing large volumes of
opinion and obtain extra investment, our intention will be to enhance
our efforts in getting real journalistic value out of this material. It
can clearly widen our agenda and our knowledge of what is happening. It
can also enhance the level of expertise from members of the public that
is present in our journalism and on our airwaves. Members of the
audience who really know what they are talking about play a vital role
in keeping our journalism up to the mark…"
You can read Horrock’s full post on the Value of Citizen Journalism on The (BBC News) Editors.