ABSTRACT
This chapter utilises two case studies—that of GuardianWitness and the BBC’s UGC Hub to look at how mainstream media organisations have sought to control the threat posed by UGC by adopting its tropes, and assimilating the content itself.
Thus, the BBC UGC Hub successfully promoted the idea of user-generated content as another source for the corporation’s journalists, rather than a different (and potentially challenging) form of journalism altogether. The Hub’s journalists had evolved to act as effective ‘gatewatchers’ and gatekeepers, both requesting content (via the ‘Have Your Say’ form) and searching for it (when there was breaking news). By setting up the Hub, the BBC was taking ownership of user-generated content, and the corporation’s journalists mostly experienced UGC through the medium of the Hub.
Arriving at the start up of the GuardianWitness app, journalists spoke of their dedication to giving opportunities to different voices and to telling different stories. Yet, the overall control of the stories and the pictures was something the staff found difficult to give up. There were also problems in reaching out to those at the centre of these stories. As a result, the content was more likely to be dominated by NGOs with their own particular agendas than those who had experienced a crisis themselves; this was something that staff at GuardianWitness co-operated with and accepted in order to get the content they required.
