One Big Worldwide Conversation?

User Generated Content (or UGC for the technical savvy, of which I now belong) has always been around. It is just that today people have the ability to send it via mobiles or post it on the web, as opposed to ringing up the local paper to complain about Miss ASBO living next door.

If we are to believe the hype, supposedly everyone is jumping on this online bandwagon, making digital stories and joining in on one big, happy conversation.

But is this actually the reality?

How democratic is the media and online world?

Rupert Murdoch stated in his speech back in 2005, that news services have to be more interactive, to enable users to contribute. It seems that several big media took this advice to heart and created websites such as CNN's iReport and the BBC's Have Your Say to help encourage the 'conversation'.

As it turns out, the conversation isn't quite as big as we might believe, currently being more of a back room natter than worldwide discussion. Why is this? The simple answer: people still do not have access to the internet. It comes as no surprise then, that the main UGC contributors are young and economically advantaged. And even then, the number interacting is miniscule, when compared to the number using the internet for consuming news.

How can this be called a conversation when all that is going on is a whole lot of reading and not a lot of writing?

It is true though, that citizen journalism is on the rise. From citizens being the first people to get footage of disasters such as the London bombings , to bloggers tapping away on their keyboards up and down the country. And as I have mentioned before, online papers written by citizens, such as the South Korean Ohmynews , have been a phenomenal success.

On the surface the media has never seemed so democratic since it went online. However, there is still a long way to go before we have the whole world in web conversation with one another. 

The era of the citizen journalist is yet to come. 

An Industry In Flux?

For someone who has only just managed to get to grips with the new Facebook layout, being advised to enter the bewildering web world of Twitter, Mento and Flickr, induced a brief state of wild panic. However, according to Glyn Mottershead in his lecture ‘Industry in flux’, I had better give them a go, as they could all play a part in journalism’s future.

These days it’s all about ‘multimedia journalism’. The crossing over between publishing, broadcasting and computing. It is not enough for a newspaper to just be a newspaper. It also has to have a sophisticated website complete with live streaming, blogs, videos and interactive timelines. As the modern day journalist attempts to embrace these ever changing platforms, is he putting himself at risk of becoming a ‘Jack of all trades…master of none’?

It appears that this idea of an ‘industry in flux’ is no new one. The cry of ‘journalism is changing’ has been shouted from the rooftops for years. After all, advancing technology is no new idea. I am sure the press journalists working in the late 1920’s watched on with fear as televisions took a prominent position in British living rooms. Did they all lose their jobs? No, because the good news is journalism is a flexible trade that is constantly adapting.

Today it is not only changing technology that the (now hyper-multi-tasking) journalist has to adapt to. They are also being confronted by another phenomenon; the ‘citizen journalist’.

These days anyone has the power to blog, record footage and take an active role in news collection. The first footage of disasters such as the Tsunami or Hurricane Katrina was not taken by BBC cameramen, but by ordinary onlookers on their mobile phones.

Although some journalists may see the citizen reporter as a threat, there is a great deal that separates the professional from the amateur. The professional journalist has professional standards, ethics, sources and an understanding of the laws and codes of practice. Perhaps it would be better to describe citizen journalism as ‘citizen news gathering’, an act of sharing local news stories, video and images. Instead of being threatened by them, let's use these new opportunities and blend them with our old editorial values.

With ever changing technology and the debate of the professional vs. amateur, we are left asking the question “where next?”

Andrew Marr claims in his book My Trade that, ‘predicting the future of journalism is a mug’s game’. He reminds us that in the 1940’s senior executives at the BBC decided there was no future in trying to put news on television, and an editor of the Daily Express, R.D Blumenfeld predicted that in order to solve the distribution problem ‘every newspaper will have its own aerodrome’.


This clip from Tomorrows World (1984) proves technology predictions are rarely ever right

Staring into a media crystal ball obviously does not work. However, I have an advantage over others; I have Twitter. Perhaps I’ll throw the question out there into cyberspace …

Image courtesy of stevegarfield @ flickr.com