The 'size zero' broadcasting diet

A senior editor - let's call him Prendergast - recently confessed to me that he was assailed by doubts about the future of broadcast journalism. Prendergast claimed that his employers, like many other media organizations, were behaving like teenage girls on a crash slimming course.

"It's bonkers," he complained, "as an organization we're being forced to go on one of those size zero diets."

Prendergast was at pains to stress that he was not talking about the latest wave of redundancies to hit his company. Like it not, he said, there were usually solid financial reasons behind decisions to trim the labour force, be it budget cuts, diminishing commercial revenues or, in his country, a failure to collect license fees.

No, that wasn't it.

Prendergast was losing sleep over moves to embrace user-generated content. "We are pouring more and more editorial resources into sifting through pictures of kittens playing with balls of wool."

He said that it was turning his company into the editorial equivalent of a skinny model with a disproportionately large head. "Even if we come to our senses, I'm scared that we will have irrevocably damaged our health."

Prendergast was unimpressed as I tried to argue the case for UGC that I have blogged about several times before, including here and here.

I believe that by empowering audiences to tell their own stories, a UGC strategy adds authenticity to news output. Text, photos and video sequences from your audience can enrich and complement the analysis, context and background provided by your journalists.

Think of all that amateur video that captured the devastation wreaked by the Asian tsunami, or the eyewitness accounts of the July 7 bomb attacks in London. Quite simply, these accounts are more powerful than the cutting and pasting, or ripping and reading of Reuters news ticker that sometimes passes for journalism.

It enables you to engage more directly with your listeners, viewers and readers to build a genuine, two-way conversation.

Prendergast remained unimpressed: "Yes, but at what cost?" he demanded.

Then I remembered the BBC Manchester blogging project, which I believe offers a sustainable model that other broadcasters should explore. It started from the premise that sifting through e-mails, reviewing thousands of pictures of kittens, building message boards and creating community platforms is an expensive business.

The cost is not just financial, as it also exposes broadcasters to legal and moral risks. (I remember when the chat room on a website I was responsible for was taken over by a neo-Nazi group.)

The Manchester blog project, which is run by Richard Fair and Robin Hamman, turns the conventional BBC way of doing things on its head.

Instead of using sub-editors to review and approve UGC, Richard and Robin simply keep an eye on where contributors are publishing their content online. And rather than building new applications, the project team is helping people to create content on existing platforms, such as Flickr, YouTube and blogger.com.

Participants are invited to attend a series of workshops, the first of which takes place on 22nd February. Speakers will discuss production values, as well as offering practical advice on how and where to create content.

The BBC Manchester blog keeps in touch by subscribing to the RSS feeds of each participant and by highlighting interesting content, in return for a promise to abide by the BBC's editorial guidelines.

I told Prendergast that while the aim of the project was to stay slender, he should think of it as more Jeff Jarvis than Posh Beckham.

Richard and Robin will be visiting the EBU on 29th and 30th March to discuss the Manchester project at the Multimedia Meets Radio event.

Comments

[John]

Thank you for the nice post.