In einem langen Referat befasst sich Peter Horrocks, seines Zeichens Chef des integrierten BBC-Newsrooms, mit dem «Value of citizen journalism» und mit den Herausforderungen, die «User Generated Content» (UGC) gerade, aber nicht nur, für öffentlich-rechtliche Medienbetriebe darstellt. Ein lohnende Lektüre. Nachfolgend nur einige Snippets aus Horrocks’ Skript:
Rund 10’000 E-Mails und User-Kommentare gilt es laut Horrocks bei der BBC an einem «normalen» Tag zu bewältigen.
- «That sounds an enormous number. But up to 5 million people can come to the BBC News website on a single day. That means that fewer than 1% of our users, even on the most active days, are choosing to say something to us.
[…]
Of course a small proportion could be indicative of a wider population, but we can’t be sure. 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.
[…]
The likelihood that increasingly well-organised digital lobby groups will pervert and exploit the interactive mechanisms that news organisations have established is a strong reason for the BBC to have a high level of caution in this area.»
Horrocks zweifelt indes nicht am «Wert» von Rückmeldungen und Informationen aus dem Publikum:
- «There is little doubt of the enormous value of audience-provided information and media in enhancing the coverage of news events. From the earliest days of audience-based journalism we have been astonished at the range of the BBC News website’s ability to garner news from the most obscure corners of the globe.»
Gerade der aktive Einbezug des Publikums in Recherchen, Crowdsourcing also, kann sich mitunter als sehr nutzbringend erweisen. Horrocks:
- «We can actively ask questions of our audience that can build a rapid picture of unfolding events. For instance, when the contaminated fuel incident happened a little while ago the BBC’s question on its website asking people to tell us where they bought their fuel if they had had a problem engine was the most accurate data any organisation in the country had about the locations where the problem petrol was being sold.»
Mit einer Reorganisation des Newsrooms will die BBC deshalb nicht zuletzt auch besser von «User Generated Content» profitieren können:
- «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. When that information is received and assessed it will be passed immediately to our journalists on any platform and will be on air on News 24, Radio 5 Live or on the site as soon as possible.»
***
«Ask readers for information, not articles» ist übrigens auch eine der «Five lessons from 2007», die Robert Niles für die «Online Journalism Review» zusammengestellt hat:
- «The failure of one “citizen journalism” Web business after another this year ought to be showing news publishers that a business model based on readers doing reporters’ jobs for free isn’t working. That does not mean that readers do not have information that can build the foundation for a website. Or that readers are unwilling to share that information. It’s just that they are not, except in rare or special circumstances, going to produce that information within or according to traditional journalism story formats. Instead, ask for information in nuggets: A photo, a short eyewitness report or a questionnaire. Use crowdsourcing techniques to collect sets of data that you can use to provide a well-reported investigative feature or breaking news package.»