Journalism versus the public 18th Jun 2009
Recently I've been eagerly following the Guardian Environment website's 'You Ask, They Answer' series. It essentially puts 'ethical' businesses in the spotlight and lets them answer questions posed by members of the public.
Q&A interviews are old hat, but this series adds a pinch of pepper to the 'interview' by letting the public pose largely un-moderated questions in real time which the respondent has to answer as soon as possible.
Last week high street homeopathy franchise Neal's Yard agreed to put itself to the test, but withdrew from the interview without answering any questions after members of the public asked some very poignant questions about the business's policies.
Besides being a cataclysmic PR failure on the behalf of Neal's Yard, it shines some interesting light on the potency of User Generated Content (UGC) in a journalistic context. The Guardian website is at the forefront of journalistic UGC, with many stories being open for comment from the public.
Comments on published articles in The Guardian are effectively secondary UGC – a forum for discussion on something which has been researched and written by a qualified journalist. Controversial comments on the article might make for a heated debate between users, but wouldn't necessarily affect the tone of the main article. The Guardian's 'You Ask, They Answer', however, uses the comment engine as the focus of the article, with only an introductory paragraph on the topic for debate as the body of text above the comment section. This effectively makes the comments the primary content of the article, like in forums.
Forums as a form of User Generated Content are as old as the Internet, and almost every industry, pastime or product range has a range of forums associated with it. However, forums are rarely – if ever – regarded with the same credence as news sites in terms of factual accuracy. Forums, by nature, are an open discussion in which anyone can be involved. As a result, forum 'Threads' are regularly unjustifiably biased and regularly libellous. Moderation of forum posts by the administrators is usually restricted merely to offensive material and rarely extends to libel or bias.
As such, the Guardian's 'You Ask, They Answer' concept strikes a middle ground in the realm of User Generated Content. It is largely un-moderated (though more so than most forums), allowing users to post any question or response, but the interviewee's answers are also presented within the comment section, which validates the comments, even if they are nullified by the response.
PR guru Max Clifford weighed in on Neal's Yard's PR failings, stressing that businesses and individuals should be quick to respond to public criticism: "You should always stand up, otherwise, all anyone gets is the other side of the argument, and people then assume – rightly or wrongly – that you don't have a leg to stand on. Only in exceptional circumstances should you keep quiet."
Clifford's advice rings true for accusations in the 'legitimate' media, but how many celebrities and brands spend time trawling forums weighing in on false or unfair accusations posted in the threads?
For many big name brands this activity is deemed a thorough waste of time, although perhaps with the Guardian elevating its UGC in this way, perhaps PR companies should start to measure UGC coverage in the same light as journalistic coverage. This echoes the rise of blogging as a pseudo-journalism and the comparison of Perez Hilton to his hoards of mimickers.
Twitter has spanned the gap between blogging, forums and journalism, and many PR companies have blindly announced that Twitter is the future of all communication, many without having actual Twitter accounts. As Twitter evolves, it is unclear as to whether Twitter will end up in the 'Journalism' box or the 'Forum' box. For now, the likes of phone company O2 use Twitter to allay the public voice, responding directly to accusations or questions about their services.
Whether or not the conversations on Twitter are given any credence is still a matter of opinion. A rumour that Patrick Swayze had died was quickly assumed to be fact as thousands of Twitterers replicated the story, only for it to later be disproven. In this way, Twitter's user generated content dealt a blow to its own reputation. This was a small victory for 'traditional' journalism, as news sites smugly remarked that unmoderated internet content shouldn't necessarily be taken at face value.
So while User Generated Content is a blessing for sites that want to promote public opinion or simply boost their web statistics, it also poses a threat to genuine journalism as it grows in social prominence. The implications posed for the economic security of news sites by free UGC is a debate for another day, but suffice it to say that the development of different types of UGC will continue to have a push/pull relationship with real journalism, and will steer the fate of the press industry into an entirely new realm of communication. Both journalists and PRs (and brands) must continue to evolve with the trends in order to weather the storm.
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