Citizen journalism and UGC (user-generated content)

The rise and rise of UGC

1) 

The audience have become ‘users’ and the users have become publishers.

"We first felt the effects of the new technologies way back in 1991".

Benefits to the audience
       In Los Angeles, four police officers had been caught one camera by an 'onlooker' recording a video from his apartment, where those four police officers had been beating up a man called Rodney King; He was also tasered. The footage had made prime time news and benefited to the audiences as they were the ones that felt to be in power over the police officers.

Do journalists fear for their jobs now everyone is producing content? It is likely that in future there will be fewer and fewer permanent trained staff at news organisations, leaving a smaller core staff who will manage and process UGC from citizen journalists, sometimes known as ‘crowd sourcing.’ Some

Although how to ‘monetarise’ UGC – how to make money for both the generator and the host of the content – is still being debated, bigger institutions have been buying up social networking sites for the last few years.

2) Citizen journalists is the collection and analysis of news and information by the general public, which would usually be put up on social media/the Internet.

3) The first example of news that was generated by the public was the attacking from the four police officers on Rodney King (an African American). The footage was recorded by a member of public who was recording it from his apartment; it was caught in 1991. 

4) The formats of participation that have been offered by news organisations are the following :

• Chat Rooms
• Q & A
• Polls
• Blogs with enabled comments 
• Message boards 
• Have your say

5) One of the main differences between UGC content and professionally shot footage is that UGC is usually taken accidentally or not in great quality. In the Media Magazine, it talks about how families may be recording a family holiday and out of nowhere, they may be recording one of the worst natural disasters that have taken place (which is also accidental but still can be used for citizen journalism). In addition, professionally shot footage is most shown in great quality as they have got far more better and HD cameras, but this is because of the fact they are well prepared for the event.

6) A gatekeeper is the process through which information is filtered for dissemination, whether for publication, broadcasting, the Internet, or some other mode of communication.

7) The role of a gatekeeper has changed of the years because of the impact citizen journalism has had on social media. Instead of sending their footage of news or information to the major news organisations, they would rather upload it onto social media sites where gatekeepers don't need to look at whether or not, that specific piece of information is 'news or not'. Therefore, there is less work for the gatekeepers.

8) One of the main concerns for the journalists themselves is that they may not have a job in the near future as the general public would then take over since they would have their own content to show (UGC). Therefore, this can lead to more of the general public acting towards it and therefore, the journalists would have less things to research up on which can result in them having no job etc. However, they shouldn't be as concerned because of the fact that journalists are more reliable than the information shown by the general public.

9) News Stories
In my opinion, I believe that, to some extent, news is misleading to the audience. This is because UGC isn't gone through gatekeepers who would be able to tell if this is news or not and since it's on the social media sites, the users would believe anything they see on the internet. However, since we still have journalists, nothing has changed within the news.

The News Agenda
The news is slowly starting to change with the content in which they are showing. Nowadays, instead of showing news that is boring but true to the audiences, they are starting to show things that the audience may start to find interesting and also very brutal.

The role of Professionals in news
Most of the roles of professionals are starting to go 'downhill' simply because of the fact a lot of content is coming from the general public and therefore, taking the public's footage without their permission, would be breaching regulations which will cost them a lot of money then.