UGC viability on news sites?

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Jemima Kiss writes :

User content is at the heart of Web 2.0, which has spawned hundreds of sites that encourage users to share, discuss and contribute their ideas, photos, videos and digital miscellany. Acknowledging and adapting to this trend has been a key challenge for traditional, professional media sites whose business models have relied on being a one-way, authoritative gatekeeper of information and content. City University’s senior journalism lecturer Neil Thurman has carried out four years of research into the uncomfortable relationship between traditional news organisations and user-generated content. Published last week, his report - ‘Forums for citizen journalists?’ - says that despite a heavy emphasis on UGC, the volume of response from users is typically very low and UGC is also a big drain on resources because of moderation and legal issues.

Talking about moderation issue raised in the study

The moderation is of course the most important issue on any news sites :The reaction to an abusive post is 100 times more on a reputed news site that a open forum or pure UGC sites. The news sites not only get flames from the regular pious users but also from the goverment, legal and sensorship authorities. A celebrity would not dare to sue a pure UGC site but would not leave if it a mainstream media company.

But still the benefits out weigh the demerits of having a UGC as in between you always have some gems who would offer you the true, genuine and unique insight to a particular topic or situation.

Outsource your moderation: Many news sites assign this double duty to their editors to moderate the content and comments. This is painful and not something an editor or media professional would enjoy. Instead of that one should device a policy, hand it over to outsourced moderator and focus on content and quality.

Pre and Post Moderation:There is no ideal method of pre-moderation or the post-moderation. One has to have both so that mistakes can be avoided and corrected. Also don’t fatigue a particular moderator on handling everything that you have. Have different levels of delegations in moderation process, so that you have a basic moderator for 1st level content filtering, 2nd level moderator who may only work on post moderation and other issues and the 3rd level of super-super moderator who acts as an arbitrator for any major disputes and issue with legal and users.

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