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Beers & Innovation 2: User Content

Issues around user-generated content became more tangible and challenged old business models in 2006, creating opportunities for start-ups. So on 30th March we invited two experts in the field of media creation and UGC - Head of BBC Global News Richard Sambrook and Yellowikis co-founder Paul Youlten - to discuss the issues...

Issues around user-generated content became more tangible and challenged old business models in 2006, creating opportunities for start-ups. So on 30th March we invited two experts in the field of media creation and UGC – Head of BBC Global News Richard Sambrook and Yellowikis open business directory co-founder Paul Youlten - to explore the issues with the audience...

Report by Deirdre Molloy

[Register and post your own comments on this report below...]

Introducing the topic, chair Jo Twist of the IPPR explained that when she was formerly working as a journalist (as BBC News Online Technology reporter) she was interested in citizen media, especially how bloggers influence how we create and generate stories. The London bombings showed that citizen media is allowing democratisation, encapsulating the growing sense that people want to get involved. What’s more, the web itself is becoming a platform, Jo remarked, and content is also taggable, creating another layer of meaning on top of the initial content.

Adam Curry said that within 5 years 50% of media will be created by the people. Now people can have their say. But what does this mean for business models? Look at what Rupert Murdoch is doing acquiring MySpace. He knows they’ve got to concentrate on what younger people are doing – creating their identities. But where’s the social networks for retired people? How do we equip them to navigate this new environment? It’s partly an issue of trust in institutions, Jo suggested.

Virtual worlds were another interesting area, she observed, as they are being used to create platforms and communities. Then there’s the business intangibles – Flickr has millions of customers who are creating its content.

Richard Sambrook – Head of Global News Division, BBC

We’re just entering the second wave of digital, Richard reasoned, and 2005 was the breakthrough year with the use of cameraphones to provide news coverage footage. The implications for other areas of life are even greater. Rather than citizen journalism, he prefers the term “citizen media” or “citizen storyteller”.

People fret away at the issues surrounding user-generated content but the issues are no different now than they have been before – eyewitnesses now send us their video accounts; it’s just a change in handling a larger amount of incoming content. Through blogs they are tapping into a greater volume of feedback, again it’s just an issue of quantity. If designed and presented in the right way, it’s just like a radio phone-in for the digital age.

Collective intelligence boosts newsgathering and accuracy

Richard highlighted the extent to which news is now broken on the web, citing the blogger Charles Johnson who outed (and hence ousted) CBS anchor Dan Rather’s faked investigation of George Bush’s military service. Finally he stressed the value of using collective or public expertise to improve the BBC’s output and professional journalism. Dan Gillmor’s now defunct Silicon Valley newspaper column for the San Jose Mercury was instructive in this regard – he realised that people around him knew more collectively than he did.

By now most major news organisation have integrated user-generated content into the way they work. In India the “See It, Report It” banner saw UGC within 12 months go from fringe right into the mainstream. It is changing editorial culture, he reflected. The idea that the 6 o’clock news will tell you want you want to know is now anachronistic, as is the view that we’ll tell you what’s good for you.

Public and professional divide more permeable

Richard considered how technology allows participation and changes the relationship between public and professional. For instance health – people tell the doctor what’s wrong with them now; they’re empowered and enabled by the internet in a way that they weren’t 10 or 15 years ago. Education is also becoming more about there being people who facilitate you and help you navigate lifelong learning. There are other areas of human activity changed by technology too, like divorce, and the stockmarket.

The difficulty is that people don’t always recognise the roles and responsibilities that go with that and some people get burned, he noted. In politics for instance, the issue of the spread of information about sex offenders means that suddenly professional judgement is transparent and sex offenders are often hounded down by the public.

Paul Youlten – Founder, Yellowikis

The generational change encapsulated by user-created content was Paul’s opening point. His 15-year-old daughter founded Yellowikis because Wikipedia delete anything that smacks of commercialism or PR – although they have pages and pages on Shell, BBC, Glaxo Smith Kline, etc, because that’s supposed to be informational.

Paul was just back from the Yellow Pages conference in San Francisco. He said Yellow Pages were at first relieved to find out what Yellowikis was – they didn’t even know what a wiki was! - but then worried when they heard it cost less than $1k to start-up and fund so far. The best conversation he had was with Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo as he wanted to speak to Yahoo! Local and Jeremy could make the introduction.

The number of listings added to Yellowikis per day depends on the amount of people blogging about them, Paul explained. We’re dealing with the MySpace generation on one had, and people who are too busy on the other, he continued. The most successful user-provisioned system to date is eBay, Paul noted. But why do people blog, send in pictures, etcetera? Motivation is very interesting if you think about it. If you look at eBay, because there’s money attached to it, it’s very successful, as is Betfair.

Alternative business models for content

Yellowikis tack was that they were starting to approach college students to make money and gain educational credits by being accredited editors. Given a sales pack and some training, they could go down to the high street and get companies signed up to the wiki.

There was two sides to Yellowikis in Paul’s estimation. The pro bono side and the commercial revenues that can be raised by charging companies a fee for adding their listing for them, and other potential revenue streams. Local papers’ revenues in the US have been decimated by Craigslist. They can’t continue their business model unaltered. Then there’s the generational issues, and issues around journalism and local content being generated that doesn’t seem to fit with local papers.

He cited Arthur Meadows, and OhMyNews!, reminding Richard that OhMyNews! still has a newsroom and still have editorial judgement. Most news organisations will use good pictures, but OhMyNews pay citizen journalists per-hit for their stories and content. It’s success is partly due to the different culture in Korea where government controls on media have been much stronger and so levels of distrust are higher – hence the people’s embrace of OhMyNews. But what, Richard Sambrook enquired, are the editorial values of OhMyNews?

Comments Is Free reinforces "writer as brand"

A delegate mentioned Fred Wilson, the New York VC blogger who said print media is moving to a system where the writer is the brand. Richard replied that you already have that in the papers with columnists and in the Guardian’s group commentary blog Comment Is Free. Take the A-list bloggers and the other bloggers – it’s the same idea: when money comes into it the escalator between them might get broken, if it’s no longer a natural spectrum.

James Governor remarked that The Long Tail applies – so you don’t have to be A-list to be influential. Another person mentioned that Digg.com only has 12 staff, and the same goes for Last.fm. He doesn’t read Wired any more because a good story from Wired will turn up on Digg.

Aggregators still reliant on credible news sources?

Richard Sambrook said Newsvine was a good example. He didn’t mind how people come to a BBC article, whether through Digg or whatever aggregator. Gareth Bourne raised the issue of credibility and validation. People will still require and look for authority.

Richard responded that the new technologies add value. Newsvine’s core news feed is from AP – you can seed stories, comment and have live chat, then it’s aggregated to you and you become your own columnist, but you still need the AP newswire to make that happen. But, Paul Youlten countered, you don’t need that. You can have group moderation.

James Governor said that so much news is press release-driven, and people are starting to put their press releases into RSS feeds. What effect does that have on journalism and publishing? Richard responded that it still needs journalists and their talent.

Zaeem Maqsood of First Capital wondered if journalists still needed big media if mechanisms are on their way to pay for this. Do good journalists need umbrella brands? Paul Youlten replied that big media is just a way of paying journalists. But others doubted that, especially in regards to funding foreign coverage.

Who is mentoring the the new journalists & content remixers?

Kathryn Corrick of the New Statesman insisted that journalists still needed editors to bring together a variety of voices. There are people out there who don’t know what is going on. We in this room might be the converted, but for the print and TV side of things, it takes time to edit and moderate and sift. How do you educate people about that? The New Statesman has around 26,000 subscribers in print almost entirely in the UK, she said, but of its online audience, 40% is from the UK, 60% from elsewhere. James Governor flagged up the Creative Archive project and observed that we’re not seeing the education to support these types of projects. Richard Sambrook pointed to the launch of BBC Jam, their online tour buses, and the Highland blogging classes – all BB educational projects in this field.

Robert Loch of Internet People and SoFlow mentioned Habbo Hotel. Economies are being created in these environments - people are actually getting paid to rake your lawn in the Habbo world. This goes to the edge of our understanding – the monetisation of virtual worlds. Jo Twist added that she had interviewed a guy who went into World Of Warcraft and photographed people’s avatars; another guy bought a space station in Second Life and has DJs piping in music live to it. Now he’s doing content and music deals with record labels.

Greg Tallent of London South Bank University commented that virtual communities work because they tap into real communities. The Epic 2014 video imagined Googlezon in 2014, but people don’t want to generate news, they want to have a pizza. In the western world it has been left and right (wing politics) that have driven the citizen journalist message, he said, but the situation in third world and emerging economies is different.

Mobile communities, "Pro-Ams", offshoring & taking risks

At what point does someone become a journalist, Richard Sambrook asked. Paul said that his daughter sees a pile of papers on a Sunday as some alien, boring thing, whereas she is engaged with life and people through the web and on Skype and mobile. Antony Goh from digital agency Glue asked if there had been any research into what young people are interested in – it’s probably an issue of news and personalisation, he surmised, but then what happens to serendipity? What you don’t know, you don’t know, Richard Sambrook replied.

Paul Youlten raised the emergence of amateur advertisers and creatives – people making ads ad hoc and sending them into the agencies. Rentacoder exemplified another trend – off-shoring. How do you keep people motivated asked Thayer Driver of Chinwag Jobs. Maybe it just doesn’t happen or dissipates, Paul replied, and then Habbo Hotel dies.

Paul Fisher of First Capital noted that just two people run the poplular RocketBoom vlog, so how does Paul manage Yellowikis? Paul said part of the plan is to charge businesses who want to lock their page to stop people vandalising it. We shouldn’t fetishise the open editorial model of wikis, he insisted.

In terms of why current UK start-ups aren’t more aggressive, Paul said you have to be careful with the community. Miko Coffey of NESTA reasoned that this was also to do with the UK education system being more risk averse and disdainful of failure, and hence start-ups tend to be more cautious and unambitious.

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About Richard Sambrook:
As head of the Global News Division Richard Sambrook is responsible for leading the BBC's overall international news strategy across radio, TV and new media. He is a member of the BBC's Journalism Board, reporting to Deputy Director-General Mark Byford. The division contains BBC World Service radio, BBC Monitoring, BBC World television and the BBC's international facing online news services. Previously as Director of BBC News from 2001 to 2004, Richard led the world’s biggest broadcast news operations, producing Radio, TV and Internet services for the UK. He has also edited the BBC’s main evening TV news programme and led their newsgathering operations. He began his journalistic career in local newspapers.

About Paul Youlten:
Yellowikis has been described as the love child of Yellow Pages and Wikipedia. Created by a 14 year-old Spanish school girl as a place to collect companies deleted from Wikipedia, control for the project was wrestled from her by her father Paul Youlten once he realised the commercial potential of such a system. When news of Yellowikis reached the blogosphere the traditional Yellow Pages industry were very upset by to learn that the most serious challenge yet to their service cost less than £150 to set up.

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About Beers & Innovation:
This is an ongoing series NMK are producing, with each Beers & Innovation focusing on a particular key issue for / sector of the UK's innovation and technology scene. The next one will be announced soon. Regular updates and relevant discussions can be found on the blog. For enquries about this or future B&I nights, email deirdre.molloy (AT) nmk.co.uk - we welcome all your comments, ideas and feedback!