The Rise and Rise of UGC - Questions

A. What is meant by the term 'citizen journalist'?
A citizen journalist is referred to ordinary people who generate the news.


B. What was one of the first examples of news being generated by ordinary people?
One of the first examples of news being generated by ordinary people was the home-made footage of Rodney King, an African-American, after a high speed chase, the officers surrounded him and beat him up with clubs. An onlooker from his apartment window footage made prime-time news and became and international media sensation. The event led to six days of rioting, 53 people dead and 4000 people badly injured.


C. List some of the formats for participation that are now offered by news organisations.

• Message Boards
• Chartrooms
• Q&A
• Polls
• Blogs with comments enabled
• Have your says

D. What is one of the main differences between professionally shot footage and that taken first-hand (UGC)?

One of the main differences between professionally shot footage and first-hand is the quality of the recording. First-hand footage is usually recorded by citizen journalists in which the quality is quite low and is usually hand held shots. Professionally shot footage usually is recorded after the event and is usually high quality footage which is used in news reports. 

E. What is a gatekeeper?

A gatekeeper is the person who decides which UCG footage is shown during the news programme. 

F. How has the role of a gatekeeper changed?

Gatekeepers receive more and more footages of UCG, in which audiences want to be shown in the news. 

  

The Rise and Rise of UGC

Is reality becoming more real? The rise and rise of UGC
Sara Mills explores the rise of the citizen journalist and considers the impact of user-generated content on news stories, the news agenda, and the role of the professionals.

Once, it was all quite simple…the big institutions created the news and broadcast it to a variously passive and receptive audience. Now new technologies mean that the audience are no longer passive receivers of news. The audience have become ‘users’ and the users have become publishers. Audiences now create their own content. We are in the era of user generated content (UGC) where the old divide between institution and audience is being eroded.
Key to this change has been the development of new technologies such as video phones and the growth of the internet and user-dominated sites. Both who makes the news and what makes the news have been radically altered by this growth of media technologies and the rise of the ‘citizen journalist’.
We first felt the effects of the new technologies way back in 1991. Video cameras had become more common and more people could afford them…unfortunately for four Los Angeles police officers!

Having caught Rodney King, an African-American, after a high speed chase, the officers surrounded him, tasered him and beat him with clubs. The event was filmed by an onlooker from his apartment window. The home-video footage made prime-time news and became an international media sensation, and a focus for complaints about police racism towards African-Americans. Four officers were charged with assault and use of excessive force, but in 1992 they were acquitted of the charges. This acquittal, in the face of the video footage which clearly showed the beatings, sparked huge civil unrest. There were six days of riots, 53 people died, and around 4000 people were injured. The costs of the damage, looting and clear-up came in at up to a billion dollars. If George Holliday hadn’t been looking out of his apartment window and made a grab for his video camera at the time Rodney King was apprehended, none of this would have happened. King’s beating would be just another hidden incident with no consequences. The film footage can be still be viewed. Try looking on YouTube under ‘What started the LA riots.’ But be warned – it makes for very uncomfortable viewing, and even today, it is easy to see why this minute and half of blurry, poor-quality film had such a huge impact.
This was one of the first examples of the news being generated by ‘ordinary people,’ now commonly known as ‘citizen journalists’, ‘grassroots journalists’, or even ‘accidental journalists’. As technology improved over the years, incidents of this kind have become more and more common. Millions of people have constant access to filming capability through their mobiles, and footage can be uploaded and rapidly distributed on the internet. The power to make and break news has moved beyond the traditional news institutions.

It is not only in providing footage for the news that citizen journalists have come to the forefront. UGC now plays a huge role in many aspects of the media. Most news organisations include formats for participation: message boards, chat rooms, Q&A, polls, have your says, and blogs with comments enabled. Social media sites are also built around UGC as seen in the four biggest social networking sites: Bebo, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. People also turn to UGC sites to access news: Wikipedia news, Google news and YouTube score highly in terms of where people go to get their news.

The natural disaster of the Asian Tsunami on December 26th 2004 was another turning point for UGC. Much of the early footage of events was provided from citizen journalists, or ‘accidental journalists,’ providing on-the-spot witness accounts of events as they unfolded. Tourists who would otherwise have been happily filming holiday moments were suddenly recording one of the worst natural disasters in recent times. In addition, in the days after the disaster, social networking sites provided witness accounts for a world-wide audience, helped survivors and family members get in touch and acted as a forum all those involved to share their experiences.
A second terrible event, the London bombings on July 5th 2005, provided another opportunity for citizen journalists to influence the mainstream news agenda. No one was closer to events than those caught up in the bombings, and the footage they provided from their mobile phones was raw and uncompromising. This first-hand view, rather than professionally shot footage from behind police lines, is often more hard-hitting and emotive. An audience used to relatively unmediated reality through the prevalence of reality TV can now see similarly unmediated footage on the news.
The desire for everyone to tell their own story and have their own moment of fame may explain the huge popularity of Facebook, MySpace and other such sites. It also had a more negative outcome in the package of writings, photos and video footage that 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho, an undergraduate at Virginia Tech, mailed into NBC News. Between his first attack, when he shot two people, he sent the package from a local post office, before going on to kill a further 30 people. In his so-called ‘manifesto’ Cho showed his paranoia and obsession, likening himself to Jesus Christ. The reporting of the terrible events at Virginia Tech that day was also affected by citizen journalism, and the footage that student Jamal Albarghouti shot on his mobile phone video camera. Rather than concentrate on saving his own life, he recorded events from his position lying on the ground near the firing. The footage, available on YouTube and CNN brought events home to a worldwide audience. We now expect passers by, witnesses, or even victims, to whip out their camera phones and record events, an instinct almost as powerful as that to save their own or others’ lives. Perhaps the news now seems old-fashioned and somehow staged if it lacks the raw, grainy low-quality footage provided by citizen journalists.

Twitter and flickr came to the forefront during the Mumbai bombings in India in late November 2008. As bombs exploded across the city, the world’s media got up-to date with events through reports on Twitter and Flickr. There were questions raised, however, that by broadcasting their tweets, people may have been putting their own and others’ lives at risk.
It was on Twitter again that the story of the Hudson River plane crash on January 15th 2009 was broken to the world. With a dramatic picture of a plane half sinking in the river, and passengers crowded on the wing awaiting rescue Janis Krun tweeted:
There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.
The picture is still available on Twitpic, under ‘Janis Krun’s tweet.’ While national news organisations quickly swung into action, it was the citizen journalist, empowered by social networking sites that first broke the story.

So who’s keeping the gate?
Are the gatekeepers still fulfilling their old function of deciding what is and isn’t news, and what will and won’t be broadcast? In some ways, yes. You can send in as much UGC to the major news organisations as you want, with no guarantee that any of it will ever be aired. In fact, last year a BBC spokesperson reported that a large proportion of photos sent in to the news unit were of kittens. While this may represent the interest of the audience, or users, it still doesn’t turn the fact that your kitten is really cute into ‘news.’
The way around the gatekeepers is with the independent media on the web. The blogosphere, for example, provides an opportunity for independent, often minority and niche views and news to reach a wide audience. In fact uniting disparate people in ‘micro-communities’ is one of the web’s greatest abilities. How else would all those ice fans communicate without the ‘Ice Chewers Bulletin Board?’ And the only place for those who like to see pictures of dogs in bee costumes is, of course, ‘Beedogs.com: the premier online repository for pictures of dogs in bee costumes.’
On a more serious note, the change in the landscape of the news means that groups who had little access to self-representation before, such as youth groups, low income groups, and various minority groups may, through citizen journalism, begin to find that they too have a voice.

What about the professionals?
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 believe that the mediators and moderators might eventually disappear too, leaving a world where the media is, finally, unmediated. This does raise concerns however. Without moderation sites could be overrun by bigots or fools, by those who shout loudest, and those who have little else to do but make posts. The risk of being dominated by defamatory or racist or other hate-fuelled content raises questions about unmoderated content: ‘free speech’ is great as long as you agree with what everybody is saying!
If there will be fewer jobs for trained journalists, will there also be less profit for the big institutions? This seems unlikely. 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. Rather than launch their own challenge, they simply buy the site. Flickr is now owned by Yahoo!, YouTube was bought by Google, Microsoft invested in Facebook, and News Corp., owned by Murdoch, bought MySpace.
There is a whole new world out there. With it comes new responsibility. There is enormous potential to expand our view of the world and our understanding of what is happening. Our collective knowledge, and wisdom, should grow. On the other hand, in twenty years time, the news could be overrun by pictures of people’s kittens and a few bigots shouting across message boards at each other.
Sara Mills teaches Media Studies at Helston Community College, Cornwall, and is an AQA examiner.
This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 30, December 2009.

Learner Response - Essay

The internet revolution has brought along many new challenges, for big companies such as News Corp. Users today have more power which is challenging the hegemony. There is rising user generated content that is being made over the internet. Users are now able to create their own content and upload it straight on sites such as YouTube and Facebook which has presented more challenges for big companies. Even though the internet is controlled by big media institutions small cottage industries are making their own way onto the internet. Sites such as mediatakeout.com provide free celebrity news for fans and readers. However tabloid papers such as The Sun charge 25p for a paper which only contains 4 pages of celebrity news, this shows that the internet has more benefits for more users and is providing a challenge for big companies. 


Users today on the internet have more power than the hegemony of old media. The internet today allows more freedom than old media does or ever has done. Users can create their own explicit content which can be watched by anyone on the internet, which would not be possible to do so with both platforms print or broadcasts. Users have the power of freedom to comment on posts made by others and comment on forums. The internet has not only brought along the internet revolution but however brought along the freedom revolution. One example of how the internet has been a source of freedom is the Arab Spring. Social networking sites such as Facebook were used to create events to arrange meetings in different Arab countries. The use of Facebook proved to be successful and became known to the world of what the internet had helped to create. The freedom that users are allowed on the e-media is the only platform that is felt to have a sense of freedom and escapism, which is worrying for big hegemony companies owning much of their conglomerates on the print and broadcast platform. 

News Diary

News Diary of Monday 17th October 2011

Broadcast - 

BBC News on BBC One 

News Agenda:

1.       David Cameron meets big six energy providers - (hard news)

2.       Trial of Jonna Yeates – Vincent Tabak admits he strangled Jonna Yeates  - (hard news)

3.       Death of Iraq solider - (hard news)

4.       Death of Dan Wheldon  - (hard news)

5.       Travellers being evicted from  Dale Farm - (hard news)

6.       Release of Hillsborough documents – after the accident that happened 22 years ago at Anfield - (hard news)

7.       Racial discrimination of police officers - (hard news)

8.       British embassy to reopen in two years in Libya – (good news)

9.       Oil spillage BP - (hard news)

10.   Pakistani Bowlers Trial continues- (hard news)

11.   Vincent Van Gogh – book released (soft news)

BBC News London

1.       London Riots and views on Met Police - (hard news)

2.       SBTV Jamal Edwards – young interpreter Labour campaign –(soft news)

3.       University lecturer jailed for drugs which led to murder of university student in West London - (hard news)

4.       St Pauls Cathedral – Protests - (hard news)

5.        Green Wall in London – (soft news)

6.       Air India flight from Mumbai to Heathrow delayed at Gatwick - (hard news)

7.       Bus Times available on mobile – (soft news)

8.       Fauja Singh – 100 year old runner  -(soft news)

The BBC news broadcast at 6pm opened with the big storyline of the ongoing problems and debates about the prices of the energy providers. The main news story was repeated throughout the news agenda. The news started of with hard news and continued with hard news throughout most of the news programme. However towards the end of the news broadcast the news became softer and happier leaving viewers happier and forgetting about the hard news that was said earlier.

Radio-

Capital FM

1.       Royal Mail to get new price freedom

2.       Battered teen’s mum to sue ‘all involved’

3.       Dale Farm travellers refused eviction appeal

4.       Hospital poisoning: 17 cases investigated  

5.       Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars to play at MTV EMAS

6.       Katy Perry enjoys beans on tours

The news on the radio began hard news and breaking news about Royal Mail, however it broke out in soft news about celebrities and music artists.

Print -

The Sun – Tabloid – National Newspaper

1.      1.  Front Page -  XFACTOR Exclusive “Cowell Explodes”, - ( soft news) alongside “Brits to ‘to foot bill’ for euro” – (hard news)

2.      2.  Katy Perry’s love for beans - ( soft news)

3.       3. Front page news “sort it out” x factor drop in viewers - ( soft news)

4.       4. Liam Fox – (hard news)

5.      5.  Zara Philliops and Mike Tindall on holiday - ( soft news)

6.       Princess Anne’s tribute to Royal Wootton Bassett  - ( soft news)

7.       Bizarre – The official charts, Lady Gaga and her outfits and Nicole Scherzinger - ( soft news)

8.       Perfect Breasts for page 3 models – accessed by doctors - ( soft news)

9.       Teen stabbed dad – (hard news)

10.   Goals pull out - ( soft news)

11.   Premier league news and results - ( soft news)

The Gazette (Southall) – Local Newspaper

1.       Front Page- Ealing Hospital faces new cutbacks – (hard news) alongside Hindu festival –(soft news)

2.       Headteachers could go on strike – (hard news)

3.       A disabled women from Hanwell told to get job after benefit cuts– (hard news)

4.       Private college in Ealing shut down due to license being taken away – (hard news)

5.       Vitamail – spam mail – (hard news)

6.       Kidney patient refused operation due to his mattress– (hard news)

7.       Charity Christmas shop open – (soft news)

8.       Coummunity centre could be reopened– (soft news)

9.       Your Letters – (mixture of news)

10.   Pictures of new school children – (soft news)

11.   Houses on sale with various agents

12.   Jobs

13.   Local sport in the area – (soft news)

The Sun newspaper had a front line headline about the xfactor which would encourage people to buy the paper than buying a paper with hard news on it. However on the side of the newspaper was the headline about the David Cameron meeting the big six companies. However the xfactor headline looked a more important storyline on the page. In comparison to the local paper the Gazette opened the newspaper with hard news. However the hard news was about the closure of a local hospital which will shock people and which will lead them to buy the newspaper to find about more news about something that will concern them.

E-media

BBC News online website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/

1.       Top 3 news article – Huhne encourages energy switching

2.       Top 3 news article - Murder enquiry of Jonna Yeates

3.       Top 3 news article -  Liam Fox Row

4.       Call from PM Hillsborough Disaster

5.       White police accused  of Met of racism

6.       ‘End of road’ for travellers

7.       Family salute Dan Wheldon

8.       Afghan solider named by MoD

On the BBC news website you can watch news bulletins and news reports on main headlines. The site is user friendly and has a clear structure. On the top of the page there is a regular update of latest news. Also on the site the news is organised in different categories such as technology, entertainment, education and so on.  Many of the news headlines are linked onto another page which contains the information of the news article. The news website has a mixture of hard and soft news for users as they can select which news article they would like to read. You can also register for BBC news’ RSS feeds, podcasts, text message alerts and email news. You also can comment on news articles and read the editors blog which allows users to be more interactive and put their views across. 

Research on Media Institutions

"Who are the major players in terms of news providers in the UK and what exactly do they own?"

Three Media Platforms:

Print:

One of the major players in the print platform are tabloids. The Sun is one of the biggest selling newspapers in the UK daily. It has the tenth- largest circulation of any newspaper in the world and the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in the UK. The Sun had an average daily circulation of 2,821,618 copies in July 2011. Between July and Decemeber 2010 it had an average daily readership of approximately 7.6 million, of whom approximately 2.65 million were in ABC1 demographic and 4.9 million in the C2DE demographic. The Sun newspaper is owned by News International (Rupert Murdoch) who has a great influence over today's media. Up until late summer 2011 The News of the World had been reffered to be the sister paper of The Sun which was also owned by News International.

News International owned by Rupert Murdoch has many collegements within News International such as The Sunday Times. Rupert Murdoch also ownes BSKYB which overlinks onto the broadcast platform as BSKYB presentes the news on Sky News.

Broadcast:

Rupert Murdoch's share in BSKYB allows him to have a influence on the news that is presented. Sky News has a 24 hour channel which reports breaking news to the public. Vaules which are presented in News International's papers are also presented in Sky News.  TV Channels one to five all show the news are regular intervals and times. On BBC Three every hour there is usually an 60 second update for viewers about the news. However, although there are many channels on BSKYB one of the biggers major players in terms of news providers are the BBC. As the BBC is government funded and ran it provides a 24 hour news coverage channel and a daily news show called 'The Breakfast Show' on BBC 1 every morning.

E-media:

Alongside tabloid newspaper's websites online there is a variety of sources that provide news. MSN and BBC are one of the insitutions that provide online news to users. News online has a high readership as it can be accessed from anywhere on the go. Also many users subscribe to RSS feeds of the news sites which provide news readers with the news on their phones about breaking headlines about the world around us.

Case Study On Google

Case Study – Google

·       Who owns the site?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin both started the search engine while in their twenties. They met on a science program in Stanford University in California. They both dropped out of school and began the making of the search engine in a friend’s garage in Menlo Park California. Google began in January as a research project by Larry page and Sergey Brin. Larry Page and Sergey Brin first created a search engine called BackRub. However it later became known as Google once it was taken off the Stanford servers because it was using too much bandwidth.

·      Do they also own any traditional media businesses?

At the moment Google do not own any traditional media businesses.

·     What other internet sites do they own?

Google own many internet sites. Two of which are popular social networking sites, Google + and Orkut. In October 2006 Google brought the site YouTube for $1.65 billion . YouTube allows users to create their own content and upload their own videos. YouTube is a popular site which receives 72 million individual visitors a month. Google also own the emailing site called G-mail and the Blogging site Blooger. In June 2005 Google released Google Earth. It was created by a company called Keyhole Inc which was funded by Google.  Google Earth displays satellite images of varying resolutions of the Earth’s surface, allowing users to see things like cities and houses. Google also own Picasa which allows users upload their photos online. They also own Google SketchUp. Google SketchUp is a 3-D modelling program marked by Google and designed for architectural, civil and mechanical engineers as well as film-makers, game developers and related professions.  Google own one of the biggest internet browsers, Google Chrome.  Google’s Chief Executive Eric Schmidt was against the idea of building an independent web browser. He stated that “At the time, was a small company”. Google Chrome was publicly released in September 2008 in 43 different languages.
http://asher.searchwarp.com/swa300671.htm

·       What is their revenue?

Google’s revenue in the year 2010 was US$ 29.321 billion (2010).

·      What is its overall worth?

A recent estimation Google is now worth $163.2 billion (November 2010).

·      Research five key facts about the institution

·         Google recently celebrated it’s 13 birthday on Tuesday 27^th September 2011.

·         The infamous “I feel lucky” is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.

·         Orkut is very popular in Brazil. Orkut was the brainchild of a very intelligent Google engineer who was pretty much given free reign to run with it, without having to go through the normal Google UI procedures, hence the reason it doesn’t look or feel like a Google application. They are looking at improving Orkut to cope with the loads it places on the system.

·         Google has the largest network of translators in the world

·         The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’

·         Employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.

·         Research shows that Google enjoys a 90 per cent share of the global internet search market.

·      Find three quotes (with reference) about the institution.

Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes. 
Bill Gates 

Half of Google's revenue comes from selling text-based ads that are placed near search results and are related to the topic of the search. Another half of its revenues come from licensing its search technology to companies like Yahoo.
Eric Schmidt

Google is a global Rorschach test. We see in it what we want to see. Google has built an infrastructure that makes a lot of dreams closer to reality.
John Battelle

·    Summarize two linked Wikipedia articles (5 bullets points each)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

·         Talks about the history/founders of Google

·         The growth of Google

·         Advertising

·         Google’s products

·         Google’s employees

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B

·         The growth of the social networking site Google+

·         Features of Google+

·         The impact of the design of the site

·         Censorship by governments (Iran Government have blocked the site when it was released)

·         Controversies about Google+

·         List the key information provided in the company’s corporate homepage 

http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/about/corporate/company/index.html

·         Overview of Google

·         Technology

·         Business

·         Culture

·         Management

·         History

·         Initiatives

·         Offices

Google’s Philosophy

·         Ten things,

·         Software principles

·          Privacy principles

·          Design principles

·         No pop-ups

·         Security

http://sunstreeks.hubpages.com/hub/Does-Google-Own-The-Internet