MM
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.
56 MediaMagazine | December 2009 | english and media centre
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
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