Imagine that you are having your morning coffee and you flip on the local news channel. You see a story about a local fire and it cuts to a phone shot video of an eye witness account. This is a user-generated content video of a first-hand account of the event taking place in real time. When we typically think of found content, we think of advertising since that’s the space we work in. However, there are many benefits to UGC usage in the newscasting world. There is value to being able to source and clear eyewitness content.
Replaces journalists: in some locations, there aren’t journalists allowed to enter the country so found content can be used in its place to tell stories.
Empowers citizens: It also gives, “user empowerment and democratization and spoken in terms of public journalism,” according to a research article by the Reuters Institute. This gives citizens the opportunity to be part of the news process instead of just being subjects.
Spread Values: Third, it allows news stories to spread journalistic values. Let’s just hope that the journalist spreading their values has good ones. The standard includes:
Public service: act as “watchdogs” that collect and disperse information.
Objectivity: impartial, neutral, objective, fair and credible.
Autonomy: journalists must be self-governing. Meaning they are free and separate from their work.
Immediacy: sense of urgency, actuality, and speed.
Emotional Connections: As with the ad campaigns that we work on, user-generated content will connect with the audience more through the emotional connections with “real” people.
DEI: Everyone has an iPhone today. Everyone takes videos and photos all day long. This creates a large pool of content to choose from where every culture will be included.
The way that news works within the UGC space is one of a partnership. The usually top-down system approach where journalist have hierarchy to distribute information horizontally is faded with the existence of UGC. The system changes to more of a collaboration but one that has the news organizations still filtering and aggregating the UGC that their audience gets to see. However, just as within our field, found content is hard to verify, source and license. It takes a substantial amount of time and news organizations are concerned that this will take resources away from reporting. Also, it seems that the UGC being in used in most stories isn’t being given credit to the creators where it should be treated as any other news source and properly “cited.” Journalists feel that their role as one who distribute the content that it is widely known that they must be credible and provide quality content and therefore, they do not need to cite these user-generated content pieces. It’s really a grey area since it’s fairly new(ish) in the space of journalism. We believe that no matter where the found content is being used, it should be cleared properly with licenses that give the user of the content the authority to provide the creator credit or not. Lastly, there is the issue of ethics when using these creator videos on the news. Were they in a dangerous situation? Was the user in harm’s way? Will it harm them to share this video publicly? There will be some sort of standards and principles implemented at some point in the near future. Ultimately, using user-generated content in the news will strengthen the bond between citizens and the news organization. if there are a good set of ethical standards, the full value of the found content is inevitable!
