About authors:

Clémence Petit-Perrot is the Children’s Radio Foundation’s Learning and Innovation Director. She oversees the development all new initiatives within the organisation. Part of her portfolio includes piloting technological solutions like WhatsApp to increase listeners engagement and measure the radio shows’ impact. Before joining CRF, she was the Southern Africa correspondent for Radio France Internationale (RFI). She also worked for the South African production company DOXA, producing social documentary films and leading a digitisation project of anti-Apartheid audiovisual archives.

Linda Daniels is a journalist by training and has worked in print, digital and broadcast media. She has reported on a range of issues, which include climate change, Intellectual Property and South African politics. Her work has appeared in local and international publications. Between 2013 and 2018, she worked at the Children’s Radio Foundation as the Radio Capacity Building Associate and managed the WhatsApp Integration project.

Please download and share the guide. We would love to hear from you – send any comments or suggestions to us at mas@mdif.org.

[pdf-embedder url=”https://www.kbridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/WhatsApp-for-Radio-Toolkit.pdf” title=”Guide #6: WhatsApp for Radio Toolkit by Clémence Petit-Perrot and Linda Daniels”]

The feature, which is still in beta, tested on two threads, one of which was the uprising in Ukraine.  Participants posted live updates to create a moving picture of the unfolding events. Users also posted comments about the live-blog feature, saying what worked and what could be done better – Reddit even responded to comments by adding features as they went along.

If the feature gets out of beta, it promises to be a useful tool for DIY journalists, as well as a valuable resource for professional journalists looking for real-time insight into developing news events.

However, as journalists, the first question that we ourselves ask after finding an image is how to verify it. Fortunately, Flickr and other photo-sharing sites, including the photo sharing feature on Google+, provide a lot of information that will help you authenticate the photos you find.

Verifying the authenticity of a photo

In the last article, we looked at a photo that was reportedly taken in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami in 2011 by the US Navy.

But how do we know that the US Navy actually took this photo? How do we verify the location? Almost all digital cameras, including camera phones or smartphones, save a wealth of data along with the image. Smartphones, and some point-and-shoot cameras with GPS receivers, also include the location of the photo in this data. This information is created and stored with the image as EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) data.

One of the benefits of Flickr is that it retains all of the data created by the camera that shot the photo. This data will tell you the date, the camera settings and whether the photo was opened in photo editing software. Sometimes it will also tell you the location of the photo, either by place name or, occasionally but especially if the photo was taken with a smartphone, the GPS coordinates. To access this information, click on Actions in the menu above the photo and from the drop down menu select View EXIF info:

This will show you all of the information associated with photo. In this case, it tells you not only a lot about the camera, but also that the photo was taken by “Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Alexander Tidd” who is assigned to the US aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan. Additionally, it tells us that the photo was opened in Photoshop. With this information, you can have a lot of confidence about the sourcing of this information and, if in doubt, you could always call the US Navy press office to confirm the details.

What about the location? That requires a bit more thought. If you look to the right of the photo, you’ll notice a map, which you can enlarge by clicking on it. You’ll also see that the dateline of the photo is Wakuya, but the map clearly shows that this photo cannot be from there because that city is landlocked, not on the coast. So the photo is probably another city in the same area; they simply used the name of a major city in the area for convenience.

How much should you trust location information on Flickr? It depends on how the information was recorded. With this photo, the location was either added manually, or, more likely, Flickr interpreted the location based on the city named in the EXIF data.

For some photos, such as this photo I took in the mountains of Colorado, the location actually comes from the GPS data from my camera phone. If you look at the EXIF information, you’ll see this:

GPS Version ID 2.2.0.0
GPS Latitude 37 deg 29′ 46.19″ N
GPS Longitude 106 deg 51′ 33.01″ W
GPS Altitude Ref Above Sea Level
GPS Altitude 3445.5 m

That information was recorded by an old camera phone, a Nokia N82. It not only recorded incredibly precise coordinates but also the elevation of the mountain ridge I was walking along. You can have a high degree of confidence in the location if the GPS information is embedded in the photo file itself. Yes, I could have added that information myself, but it is highly unlikely.

It also demonstrates that if you’re taking pictures where you might not want to divulge the exact location, you’ll want to make sure you disable all location features on your phone or camera.

For Flickr, here are a few quick rules for verification:

• Look for date and camera information. If that isn’t there, either the Flickr user doesn’t allow the EXIF information to be seen publicly, the photo has been scanned or the photo has been downloaded from another site and uploaded to Flickr.
• For photos with date or camera information, look at the EXIF data. This will often have information that shows the real source of the photo.

For instance, the EXIF data on this photo from Libya shows that someone has taken a Reuters photo and uploaded it to their own Flickr account. Although they have uploaded this under a Creative Commons licence, you cannot use it unless you pay Reuters.

On this photo of a volcano in Indonesia, the EXIF information only states:

That’s a good indication that the photo has been downloaded from elsewhere on the internet and then uploaded to Flickr. In the next in our series on UGC, we’ll look at how you can find the likely original source of the photo.

Fortunately, Flickr isn’t the only photo-sharing service that preserves the EXIF data for photos. Google+ does as well, although photos are just one of its offerings, and not all photos on Google+ are available publicly. Just as with Flickr, Google+ users can licence their photos with a Creative Commons licence and you can search for photos that you can use commercially. That’s best done through Google image search, which we’ll cover in next article in our series.

To see the EXIF information on a photo on Google+, click on the photo to bring up more information. To the right of the photo, click on the option Photo Details. That will show you a map if the photo has location information embedded in it, and below the map, you will see any EXIF data.

Reading EXIF data on any photo

Unfortunately, most social networks strip photos of their EXIF information, and often when an image is posted to the web, EXIF data is stripped out to make the image file as small as possible. However, if you want to see if EXIF information remains on any photo, on the web or on your desktop, then there are browser plugins and viewers that will show what EXIF data is available.

There are apps and plugins for Chrome, Safari and Firefox, which will work on any computer.

If you’re a Mac owner, you have a couple of extra options. You can use the built-in Preview application to see all of the data about an image, including the camera that took it. If you don’t see the More Info window, go to Tools and make sure that the Inspector isn’t hidden.

On a Mac, you can also view the EXIF data simply through the file information viewer.  Do this by right-clicking, using command-I, or holding down Ctrl and clicking then selecting Get Info. This will show you all of the information about any file in your system including an image file.

Another important verification option: Contacting the photographer

Knowing the camera that took a photo can be an important piece of information. If someone has sent you a photo via a mobile phone, you have their mobile phone number. If they took the picture with the phone, you hopefully also have some EXIF information. At a conference I once attended, a member of CNN’s UGC team, iReport, said that they would contact the photographer and simply ask them what kind of camera they took the photo with. If they couldn’t answer or if they answered incorrectly based on the EXIF information, then that automatically raised other questions.

UGC teams at major news organisations and also UGC news service Storyful have developed these techniques as the volume of content and the use of user-generated content has exploded. EXIF data is just one tool of their trade to make sure that the photos they use are authentic. In the next of our series, we’ll look at how image search services can help you uncover hoax photos.

Flickr has enjoyed a renaissance recently with the launch of an updated mobile app to allow it to compete with mobile photo services such as Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

What is it useful for?

Flickr can be a great source of images, but it is important to understand what it is good for and when you probably are best relying on more traditional methods:

• Flickr can be a good source of images for travel stories.
• Flickr includes information about the picture that will help you verify it including camera information and location information on some photos.
• Flickr allows you to search by licence showing you photos that you can use at no cost as long as you attribute them to the photographer.
• Flickr is used by the US government, including official presidential photos from the White House photo account and the branches of the US military, including the Navy, Air Force and Army. It is important to note that not all government agencies in the US or elsewhere post their pictures on Flickr with licences that allow for use on news websites. We’ll discuss the licensing of photos on Flickr in detail below.
• Unlike Facebook where you can only see pictures from your contacts and people who have no privacy settings, most Flickr images are publicly searchable.
• Flickr is not a replacement for your own photos or for a photo wire service. Unless it is a story in the United States or Western Europe, you will most likely not find photos of current news events here.

Licencing: Can I use this photo on my website?

One benefit of using photos from Flickr rather than Twitter or Facebook is that images have clear licensing terms and you know which photos you can use legally. Everyone on Flickr retains full copyright to their photos, but some people choose to pre-emptively licence their photographs for reuse. Photos that are not licensed will carry the copyright symbol and the text “All Rights Reserved” on the photo page, in the column to the right of the photo. If you wish to use a photograph that is all rights reserved, you must get the permission of the photographer first. Flickr does make it relatively easy to contact photographers, and many are happy to give you permission, so don’t let ‘all rights reserved’ put you off.

If a Flickr user wants to pre-emptively grant certain permissions for the reuse of their images, they can choose one of several Creative Commons licences. Creative Commons is an easy way for creators to tell others how they would like creative work – photos, images, writing, videos, etc – to be reused and on what terms. Note that creators still retain traditional copyright to their works.

Creative Commons licences have four options that can be used in combination with one another. Flickr has one of the best explanations of the options for Creative Commons licences:

Attribution means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work – and derivative works based upon it – but only if they give you credit.

Noncommercial means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work – and derivative works based upon it – but for noncommercial purposes only.

No Derivative Works means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

Share Alike means:
You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a licence identical to the licence that governs your work.

Note that the Share Alike licence means that if you use a Share Alike licensed image, you must then licence your own content using that exact same Creative Commons licence. Using such a licence is rare for a commercial news website, which effectively rules out the use of Share Alike licensed content.

Finding Creative Commons on Flickr

For most news organisations, you’ll want to use photos that have either Attribution or Attribution-No Derivative Works licences. If you use a photo with a No Derivative licence, you can resize it but not crop it or alter it. For most Flickr users, if they use a non-commercial licence, they do allow for news use. However, Creative Commons users will often have more detailed information on their profile page. For instance, US space agency NASA uses the non-commercial licence but does allow for news use as is explained on the agency’s profile page. NASA explains the terms of use for the photos that it posts as this:

These official NASA photographs are being made available for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photographs. The photographs may not be used in materials, advertisements, products, or promotions that in any way suggest approval or endorsement by NASA.

There are two ways to find photos with the appropriate Creative Commons licence. The first way is to use Flickr’s advanced search. To access the advanced search options, you’ll first have to enter the subject of your search. That will show you all of the results related to your search keywords. Now, you will the advanced search option to the right of the blue search button.

If you’ve ever used the advanced options for search engines, many of the options here will be familiar. For instance, you can search for an exact phrase or exclude terms for your search. There are other options that are specific to Flickr. For instance, if you are a Flickr user, you can search your own photos, photos you have favourited, photos from you contacts and photos from your friends and family. You can also search special photo collections on Flickr as well. These include:

• The Getty Images Collection – Flickr uses Getty to allow Flickr users to licence their photos through Getty for sale. If you have a budget for photos, there are many high quality images on Flickr by professional photographers.
• The Commons – This collection shouldn’t be confused with photos that are licenced by Flickr users using Creative Commons. The Commons is a collection of photographic archives and libraries around the world. They are mostly historic photos and many, if not most of them, are either copyright free, in the public domain or available for reuse with attribution. You’ll want to pay close attention to the licencing terms on the photo page.
• US government works – This can be an excellent source of photos for news coverage, and for all intents and purposes, these images are free of copyright. Under most images under this licence, there is comprehensive caption and sourcing information. The White House and major US agencies including the US State Department, the US Treasury, the US Department of Energy and US Food and Drug Administration just to name a few.

At the bottom of  the page, you will see the options to limit your search to only look for photos with Creative Commons licences.

By selecting the first option, you will limit your search to only photos using a Creative Commons licence. The next option will limit your search to photos that can be used commercially, and the final option will search for photos that can be modified, meaning that they lack the No Derivatives licence. Note that this will not exclude photos with the Share Alike licence, so be careful to look out for that in photos you want to use.

Another fast way to find Creative Commons on Flickr is via a page dedicated to all of the Creative Commons licences photos that have been uploaded.

The first two groups include photos with the appropriate licences. Click on the link “See more”, and this will allow you browse or search only photos with that particular licence. For instance, clicking on See More for photos with an Attribution licence shows you some of the tens of millions of photos with that licence. There is a search box at the top of the page that will allow you to search photos with only the Attribution licence. Let’s look for photos of the earthquake that struck Japan in 2011. You’ll see when you search that Flickr has restricted the search to Creative Commons content with an Attribution licence.

You can sort your search by “Relevant – Recent – Interesting”. Relevant and recent are self-explanatory. But what does Flickr mean by “Interesting“? Flickr explains interesting this way:

There are lots of elements that make something ‘interesting’ (or not) on Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing.

In a lot of ways, it’s a mark of popularity.

After looking at some of the photos for this search, you’ll notice that some of the photos have come from the Official US Navy account, such as this one:

It is the kind of photo that an editor probably would have wanted to use to illustrate a story about the disaster. If you look to the right of the photo, you will see a lot of information about it, including the account of the photographer or group, information about the camera that was used to take the photo as well as when and sometimes even where the photo was taken. You’ll see the most recent photos in the account, and below that you will see tags, keywords, that help describe the subject of the photo. Below the tags often is information about the settings of the camera when the photo was taken. Below that, you will see the licence information, in this case, the Creative Commons Attribution licence. For official photos like this, an official caption will be included with the photo. In this case:

WAKUYA, Japan (March 15, 2011) An aerial view of damage to Wakuya, Japan after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami devastated the area in northern Japan. Ships and aircraft from the Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group are conducting search and rescue operations and re-supply missions as directed in support of Operation Tomodachi throughout northern Japan. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Alexander Tidd/Released)

Attributing the photos correctly

You’ll notice that we frequently use Creative Commons photos from Flickr here on Knowledge Bridge. I include the attribution in alternative text of the photo so even if there isn’t a caption that the attribution is still available. For photos that require attribution, it’s best to include the title, when relevant, but you must include the photographers name, the agency name if it came from a governmental agency, or the Flickr user name if no real name is given. Flickr appreciates it if you say that the photo is from Flickr, and when using Creative Commons photos, you should also note, Some Rights Reserved to make it clear that the photos are not from a wire service or your own copyright. For instance, for the photo above, a correct photo credit would be:

An aerial view of damage to Wakuya, Japan, U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Alexander Tidd, from Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

If the photo isn’t from a government agency or official account, you will want to verify the source of the image. Flickr also helps you do that, which we will cover in another guide.

Flickr is a valuable service for journalists because it retains a lot of information that will help you know with confidence not only the licence of the photo but also its source. It is why a number of journalists use it as a source for photos for their stories when they cannot get a photo through traditional means.

News website Mediazavod.ru in Chelyabinsk collected pictures and social media updates to illustrate their coverage of the meteor.  MDIF publishes Knowledge Bridge, and Mediazavod is a project of MDIF’s client ChRM.

In one story in which they collected reaction from social media, they quoted Twitter user Igor de Paul, who said:

Judging by the level of noise, Chelyabinsk meteorite fell directly on Twitter.

The Chelyabinsk meteor was just one recent story where people experiencing an event were key in documenting it, and it is just one example of user-generated content, or UGC, as it has come to be known. Pictures, videos and first-person accounts of news events are just one type of UGC. In addition to these eyewitness materials, users also share their opinions via social media and in the comments on your site. Members of your audience may also share their expertise, their knowledge, which can be a powerful addition to your stories. To get the most benefit from these contributions, it’s important to understand the different types and different ways that people are creating and sharing content.

By understanding the different types of UGC, you can develop the most effective and most efficient way to engage your audience with your journalism.

Types of UGC: Experience, opinion or expertise

I take quite a broad and literal view of user-generated content. For me, it is any content not created by your staff, and this could include:

• Photos or videos from members of the public, shared online or directly with your publication, your website or your TV or radio station.
• Pieces written by a member of the public for your site, such as an external blogger, or written on a personal site, which are then republished on your site.
• Comments on articles, columns or analysis.

In 2013, people are creating and sharing more text, pictures and video than ever before, and the volume of content as well as the number of ways that people are sharing this content can be overwhelming for news organisations. It’s useful to take a step back and clarify your editorial – and business – goals to help you focus your efforts.

From an editorial point of view, there are three broad types of UGC. Each type of UGC is used to achieve a different strategic purpose:

• Gathering people’s experiences: this is a way of enhancing your own news coverage and is most useful when covering a fast-developing story, such as a natural disaster or a terrorist attack. Eyewitness reports can be integrated into your coverage to give it added immediacy, insight and depth, or it can stand alone to provide a complementary, often more emotional, view of events. While most useful during breaking news events, news organisations often build up a relationship with their audiences by asking for pictures or videos for things like popular festivals and the weather. Then, when news breaks, audiences are in the habit of sending their pictures and videos to you.
• Gathering people’s opinions: providing space for your audience to share their opinions on specific stories or features is a way to help build audience engagement and loyalty. However, you need to take into account the cost of monitoring comments.
• Gathering people’s expertise: if you need expertise in a subject that your traditional sources don’t possess, you might be able to call on a member of your audience as an extra resource to help develop a story. Or on a more basic level, you may be able to quote them as a source.

By looking at these editorial goals more closely, you should be able to develop the best approach to achieve your objectives. Here we’ll be looking at UGC strategies, but over the coming weeks, we’ll also be creating guides to help you put these strategies in action.

Gathering people’s experiences

Gathering people’s experiences has been one of the greatest areas of focus for news organisations. Most news businesses now understand that it is an extension of traditional reporting. This material has often been called citizen journalism, but that umbrella term actually captures a lot of different activities and often mistakenly layers on the professional motivations of journalists on citizens who just want to take a picture or record a video to say “I was there”. Political groups are now creating and distributing their own material in an effort to gain support for their causes. Regardless of the motivation, it has become a powerful force in journalism, giving rise to social media editors and verification teams to analyse and authenticate the material being shared.

• The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami was one of the earlier examples of how inexpensive digital video cameras helped capture a story in ways that would have previously been impossible.
• Japan recently commemorated two years since the devastating earthquake and tsunami that devastated coastal cities and triggered the Fukushima nuclear incident. For days after the massive wave inundated Japanese cities, videos taken by people caught up in the tragedy were posted to YouTube and picked up by news channels around the world.
• During the Arab Spring, UGC was often an important element in telling the story, and now in Syria, opposition forces have their own Facebook pages and YouTube channels. Such material provided critical material in the early days of the conflict when the Syrian government severely limited access to the country by foreign journalists, but it also raised issues about the veracity of the material.

I was in the BBC website newsroom when the first reports of the 7 July 2005 London bombings came in. The story marked a watershed in BBC coverage, as the broadcaster’s media correspondent Torin Douglas noted at the time:

That day, the BBC received 22,000 emails and text messages about the London tube and bus bombings.

There were 300 photos – 50 within an hour of the first bomb going off – and several video sequences.

In operational terms, we can break down the process of gathering people’s experiences into two broad methods:

• Finding comments and media that people are sharing online.
• Gathering comments and media directly from audiences.

With the tremendous volume of content that people are posting online, many news organisations have developed techniques to efficiently find and verify material online as well as policies on the use of such material that is consistent with their existing editorial standards and guidelines.

Techniques to help gather this type of UGC material include:

• Engaging users via pages or accounts on popular social networks such as Facebook, vKontakte and Twitter.
• Using social media dashboard applications and services such as Tweetdeck, Hootsuite or Sproutsocial that allow you to efficiently monitor multiple social networks, accounts, hashtags and search terms at once.
• Using advanced search techniques to find photos and video. Twitter has a number of advanced, but not well known, ways to search updates, allowing you to only see those with images, video or updates from a specific location.
• New types of social media applications such as Geofeedia that allow journalists to quickly find social media updates, video and photos based on location.

However, material published online is just one way to get photos, videos and eyewitness accounts. Long before social media, there were many lower-tech ways to gather such material, and those techniques still work, especially in places where internet access is limited.

Before the BBC created its UGC hub, the BBC News website simply added an email address at the bottom of stories to ask if people had information about the story. With the rise of mobile phones, they then added SMS and multimedia message numbers. Due to this early move into taking reports from the public, the BBC was uniquely positioned to take in material from the public during the 7 July 2005 bombings.

SMS is still a very effective way to get news tips and get information from the public. Photo credit: Texting in Uganda by Ken Banks from Flickr

SMS and MMS remain an excellent way to gather eyewitness reports because not only do you get the message, but it is easy to call the person who submitted the report for additional information or for verification. For news organisations, FrontlineSMS, a free, open-source SMS message management application, can help them manage text messages by adding keyword searches. It also adds functions such as being able to conduct polls via SMS.

Samuel Ndhlovu, news editor for Breeze FM in Zambia, says the station uses FrontlineSMS in a number of ways to engage audiences including “to get news tips from our listeners”.

Other technologies such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) are also being used by radio stations both to deliver their content and to receive news tips from listeners via mobile phones, Gopal Guragain, the executive chairman of Communication Corner the parent company of Nepali radio network Ujyaalo 90, told MDIF’s media forum in Jakarta last December.

Your audience wants to contribute, and it’s important that you give them as many ways to do it as possible and take into account the ways that they are already sharing content and the technology that is most available and affordable to them.

Key points: Using photos, videos and eyewitness reports from your audience can add greatly to your reports, and it can also help you build loyalty with your audiences. Make sure that your audience knows how to send their submissions to you. Publicise your SMS, IVR, email and social media contact details, and when users contribute to your reports, make sure to credit them. Let them know that their contributions are valued, and you’ll get more and higher quality contributions.

Gathering people’s opinions

Probably the next most common way for news organisations to take advantage of UGC is to gather people’s opinions. Again, just as with collecting eyewitness material for news reports, methods for gathering opinions can be broken down into two main types: offsite and onsite. You can either monitor social media and find people’s opinions via social media, or you can have comments below articles, forums or direct ways for people to submit their opinions.

In terms of canvassing opinions via social media, many of the same techniques that are used for finding eyewitness accounts or multimedia are effective. Many organisations use their social media accounts to gather opinion as well as material for news reports.

Of course, one of the most common ways for websites to gather opinion is via comments below articles. Comments can be an excellent way to engage your audience, but I think it’s important to consider your editorial goal. Some news organisations believe that comments are a good way to gather eyewitness accounts, but the public often view this not as a place to leave an eyewitness report but simply as a place to state their opinion. As noted above, it might be better to list an email address and an SMS number where people can send their reports rather than open comments on a story.

Comments also have a cost, in time and money. News organisations spend money on services or staff to monitor comments, not only for content that might be valuable for reporting but also for potentially libelous material or material that simply breaks their community policies. Yes, this can be done by staff, but that still takes up time and is a cost to your business.

Too many websites have focused on quantity over quality in terms of opinion, enabling comments across the entire site. The reasoning is often that they believe, admirably, that they should give everyone a right to have their say. From a business standpoint, such strategies are an attempt to compete with social networks for discussion and the high time on site that can come with it.

From my experience, online communities on news websites need to start small and then grow. I increasingly think that they rarely belong on news stories, and for many news organisations with limited resources, it makes more sense to limit comments to opinion pieces, blog posts and other features that are meant to solicit public opinion, rather than enable them across the site. Have specific features focused on stories that your audiences care about the most and are talking about the most. Focus the conversation and play an active role in it, highlighting the best contributions.

I also think that registration makes sense. This might deter some from participating, but it will demonstrate at least a minimum level of commitment to your journalism and your community. Completely open comments are an easy invitation for abuse and for people who simply want to antagonise others rather than have a meaningful discussion. Besides, registration can gather important details about your audience that will be helpful in selling to your advertisers.

Just as with gathering eyewitness material, website comments and social media are just two high-tech ways to gather opinion. SMS, phone calls or even good old-fashioned live audiences can all be used to gather public opinion.

Tried and true non-digital methods still have a place in a digital world. As Ndhlovu of Breeze FM says, they use SMS not only to gather opinion but also to solicit programme feedback:

FrontlineSMS is mostly used to engage with our listeners on a number of issues, which include programmes on agriculture, health, education, environment and development. The station also uses Frontline for debate on important issues through our programme called “People’s View Point”.

Frontline is also used to get feedback from listeners on our programming. Listeners are encouraged to send text messages, which assists the station to tailor our programmes according to the needs of our audience.

Key points: When it comes to gathering opinion, less can often be more. Unfocused efforts to gather audience opinion can come with high management costs. It’s important not to conflate your efforts to gather eyewitness reports, photos and videos with efforts to gather opinion. Keep your efforts to gather both focused and be clear with audiences about what you want and you’ll get better more manageable results.

Gathering people’s expertise

Tapping into the expertise and knowledge of your audience is probably one of the least explored opportunities by news organisations and, apart from a few examples, such efforts rarely are separated out from gathering eyewitness accounts or opinion. At the moment, many news organisations find excellent unknown sources of information in comments on their stories almost by accident rather than through a well thought-out strategy. For those who do look to their communities and have a budget for it, they do so through a relatively large dedicated team of community managers – a cost that many news organisations cannot afford.

While I was working at The Guardian, we did try a few useful low-cost experiments that tapped into the knowledge of their audience. During an investigation into former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s finances, they came to a point where they needed specialist knowledge. In the past, they might have found and interviewed a forensic accountant to untangle the web of his finances. Instead, they honestly admitted the limits of their knowledge and reached out to Guardian readers to help fill in the blanks. For the person who helped them, they offered an original political cartoon created by Steve Bell, one of the best known political cartoonists in Britain. They launched the effort on 1 December 2009 and posted many of the source documents online. By 17 December, they declared the case solved with the help of “Richard Murphy, a crusading accountant from Tax Research UK”.

It was an interesting project, but the problem is that such crowdsourcing efforts don’t scale. It’s difficult to do such projects frequently because they take a lot of effort. One could argue that investigations always do, but it might have been quicker just to consult a forensic accountant rather than turn it into a contest.

However, there are other innovative projects that have developed methods for news organisations to systematically tap into the knowledge of their audiences. One such project is the Public Insight Network. The project created by American Public Media in the US helps news organisations not only find informed sources in their audiences, but it also helps newsrooms keep track of those sources for future stories. The system uses a database to store audience members who have contributed to stories in the past, storing both the types of stories they contributed to and expertise they might have. This allows participating news organisations to know what stories the audience member might be interested in contributing to and also what knowledge and expertise they might have to contribute to future stories.

Projects like the Public Insight Network show that there is real potential in systematically tapping into the knowledge of your audience, as well as their experiences and opinion. By clearly identifying your editorial goals, your UGC efforts will be more focused and more effective, using fewer resources and delivering better results.

In newsrooms, some journalists worry that UGC is simply a cheap replacement for traditional reporting. However, if not done strategically, UGC is anything but cheap, costing money in the form of staff time to monitor and moderate comments, as well as sifting through a huge volume of user submissions or content on social media sites. It’s important for news organisations to develop a UGC strategy that balances costs, revenue and editorial value.

Focused editorial strategy

Digital media and UGC can deliver richer content at little cost, but savings are only achievable with a focused editorial strategy with clear goals and a systematic, scalable way to achieve them.

As we discuss in the main piece for this month’s Digital Briefing, there are a number of key editorial goals that UGC can deliver:

• Gathering people’s experience, their photos, videos and eyewitness accounts.
• Gathering people’s opinions, either via social media, comments on your site or blog posts from the public.
• Gathering people’s expertise by finding knowledgeable members of your audience.

The first step in developing your UGC strategy is to consider what you’re trying to achieve. Focus is key, and sites such Slovak news magazine Týždeň have switched from open, high-volume blogging strategies to a “VIP” blogging model where they choose the bloggers. Federika Homolková, Managing Director of Týždeň’s publishing house, said this about their change in strategy:

At first, we opened the blogs for everyone so that anyone could set up a blog and start blogging. We had hundreds of bloggers, but actually only about a dozen of them were active. It was quantity but not quality, and we are all about quality and not quantity.

In switching models, they have cut the number of bloggers to roughly a tenth of what they were under the open model, but traffic has remained the same despite the reduction in volume of content.

When making your business plan, it’s also important to be clear that UGC is not free content. You will want to consider the costs of training your staff, or if you have the budget, hiring a social media or community editor to help gather and evaluate UGC.

If comments and on-site community are a key part of your UGC strategy, you should consider the cost of monitoring and moderating comments. Monitoring and moderating comments is important. Community strategies can help you find new stories but only if staff are monitoring the comments. By keeping comments focused on areas where you think there will be the most debate or possibility for community contributions, this will keep the editorial and financial costs manageable. Moderation is important because while you want the debate to be lively and contentious, you don’t want it to become overly combative and caustic. If your community becomes toxic, it can also be toxic to advertisers.

Large news organisations often have special community management staff or hire outside companies to monitor their comments. For smaller news organisations, this is often not financially viable. You can allow your audience to report abuse or report comments that they find offensive or think break your community policy, but if your site has a high volume of comments, this will become difficult as well. One way that many news organisations encourage engagement but keep contributions to a manageable level is not to enable comments on all articles. Enable comments only on the stories which you believe your audience will be most interested in debating or discussing.

Some news groups that have pursued focused UGC strategies have found tangible benefits. The Guardian often involves its audience in its reporting, a process known as crowdsourcing. A review of their efforts found:

• Users who interacted with crowdsourcing projects viewed “30 times more pages than the average user”.
• They “come back to more than one page a day”.
• They “register with our site which gives us more data”.

In short, these users were much more engaged than the average user, and they spent much more time with Guardian content. This high level of engagement is important not only for the success of these crowdsourcing projects, but it also has commercial value; it is very hard to earn revenue from members of the audience who come to your site, view a single page and then leave quickly.

Attracting new audiences and advertisers

An effective UGC strategy can also be used to attract new audiences, people you don’t reach currently, including audiences which are attractive to specific advertisers.

One great example of a UGC strategy that helped a newspaper attract a new audience is STOMP, Singapore’s Strait Times Online-Mobile-Print project. The award-winning project has taken advantage of user-submitted photos, blogs and social media to attract younger readers. The site used a sophisticated means of rewarding loyal users long before it became commonplace on social networks, and it tapped into the use of camera phones and mobile just as the smartphone revolution was taking off. While many newspapers find it difficult to attract younger readers, STOMP has delivered a demographic that doesn’t have a strong relationship with print.

Another UGC strategy that has been pursued by many publications is to develop a network of niche, often lifestyle blogs, written by non-staff members. The blogs cover things like food, school sports, hunting and fishing or other popular activities that newspapers, especially smaller ones, couldn’t otherwise cover.

The Spokane Spokesman-Review in the western US state of Washington launched a blog network following this strategy a decade ago. The pitch to local advertisers is that these blogs attract a specific, not general, audience, delivering people they know are likely to be interested in their products. For instance, a local food and cooking blog, which the network has, can be attractive to local markets and speciality food producers. Their outdoors blog will attract readers that outdoor stores or wilderness travel groups will want to reach. It’s a form of targeted advertising based on content. In the past, this would have been done using a special supplement, but now it can be done much more cheaply, in terms of production and content costs, using blogs.

Direct revenue opportunities

Some news groups are even experimenting with direct revenue from UGC. After Barack Obama’s historic 2008 election, The Guardian asked for pictures from its online audience with the theme “Message for Obama”. They used Yahoo’s photo-sharing site Flickr to gather the pictures and posted the images on their site. With people using homemade signs and self-portraits, they sent a range of messages such as “Be Safe” or “I did not vote for you”. After collecting more than a thousand pictures, they used a print-on-demand service called Blurb to publish and sell a book of the photos.

In January, we looked at how El Faro in El Salvador asked Salvadorans both at home and abroad for ideas to make the country better. They submitted their suggestions by posting them on Twitter using a common hashtag, #TuideaEF, which means “your idea” in Spanish with EF for El Faro. They chose the best 200 and had their political cartoonist, Otto Meza, illustrate those suggestions, and they published these ideas in a book. The first print run sold out.

Newspapers with printing plants have a unique opportunity to collect UGC digital content and print it in other media to earn revenue, but as The Guardian showed, there are a number of low-cost print-on-demand services that allow anyone to create books or other products out of UGC that you can sell. You’ll want to be clear when you collect the photos or videos about how you plan to use them. Most people who submit their photos or videos are not looking for money, just recognition, so from the start you should be upfront about your goals.

With a focused editorial and commercial strategy, UGC can be an important element in enriching your coverage and adding revenue to support your traditional newsgathering efforts. UGC isn’t free content, but there are a number of commercial strategies that you can employ to leverage it to generate meaningful new revenue.

Original journalism is expensive to produce and can be hard to sell. This is one of the attractions of user-generated content (UGC), both for established news organisations seeking to develop their existing business and for UGC-focused start-ups.

UGC has received a fair bit of criticism, some of it deserved. If quantity outweighs quality, there can be too much noise to filter through. Even so, every once in a while, gems are found. Leveraging those gems, those quality users, is the key to effectively using UGC.

UGC might look free, but isn’t

The purpose of leveraging UGC is not simply to offer an outlet of expression, it’s also a way to create an avenue for deeper engagement with the discovery and creation of a story. But just because users are contributing content to your site, it doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be an editorial process; it’s not always easy for an algorithm to weed out people who contribute negatively or provide a distraction to healthy debate and discussion, but human editors do a good job of sidelining the irrelevant. This means that while UGC may seem free, a consistent source of directed content generally has some management overhead.

Management overhead exists along a spectrum, often depending on the level of direction you want to give contributors. It’s possible to get free quality UGC, but the subject matter is likely to be random – people don’t mind creating content and giving it away, as long as they can decide what they write about. The more specific you are in setting the subject of the contribution, the less likely it is that your audience will have an expert on the subject who is in the mood to write about it. However, some online sites such as Quora, Medium, and Svbtle are able to cherry pick contributed content because of existing networks.

Filtering processes for quality content

One successful model for building a business around UGC is to have a strong filtering process and editorial layer. It’s becoming more common for sites to limit the involvement of users on the site until their reputation has increased. This filtering process can even be done by the users themselves. As a user gains more credibility in the community – possibly by making short but high-quality comments – access and control is unlocked; they gain the ability to write in-depth comments, moderate content on the site, or self-publish. These types of system separate the quality contributor from the also-ran very effectively.

Then there’s the issue of audience. The bigger the audience you offer, the easier you’ll find it to attract quality free talent. If you have a small audience it can be a chicken-and-egg scenario: you need quality contributions to attract a large audience, but you need a large audience to attract quality contributions. To overcome this, one strategy that can work is to build a small cohort of quality contributors with the promise of marketing the cohort’s content.

But it’s time-consuming (another form of cost) to build an audience when most audience members haven’t built up enough credit to be able to completely participate in the community.

Leveraging contributions for profitability

As a community of contributors is developed, it’s important to leverage them, without taking advantage of them. Monitoring trending topics and cross-referencing them against the interests of community members is key to getting relevant content from contributors. A conventional editorial process is also helpful in cleaning up copy and refining content so that it more effectively communicates ideas. All of this comes at a cost in staff time, which leads to the importance of monitoring every single touchpoint with a piece of content by a staff member.

Simply taking into consideration the salaries of editors is not enough. A high-level view of the operation doesn’t help improve processes. What is critical is a detailed view of the cost-benefit; the ability to see how much time has been invested, and continues to be invested, throughout the life of the story. This data needs to be laid against the consumption data – pageviews, time on page, shares, likes, comments – to see where additional costs make sense and to understand when each piece of content turns the corner of profitability.

Armed with this knowledge, you’ll be able to see whether UGC can contribute to your business.

In a lot of ways, digital audience engagement strategies are just reincarnations of the kind of things you’ve done in the past, whether it was a radio call-in show or a call for community pictures for your newspaper. For those of you who work in radio, you’ll know you get the best response to a phone-in when you get the question right, and it is much the same in digital. If you want people to contribute digitally, make sure you have a clear call to action – be clear about what you want and how you want people to participate.

The Guardian, where I worked as blogs editor, has long been experimenting with getting its readers involved in its journalism. One key thing to remember when you’re doing experiments of any kind is to learn from them. Routinely ask yourself what works and what doesn’t. Digital media is much more adaptable, and it gives you the opportunity to continually measure and make adjustments to your strategy. The Guardian did this with one of its recent experiments in open journalism.

In October of last year, The Guardian began publishing its daily newslist online and asked people to contribute and get more deeply involved in the newspapers’ coverage. Within a week, it began to review the lessons that came from publishing the newslist and a related blog. They realised that when covering complex issues, it often took more than a few hours to gather comments they could act on from the public. In January, they launched a liveblog called Newsdesk Live to gather comments on the newslist.

Now, less than a year after its launch, The Guardian is fine tuning its approach to opening up its newslist. They are going to end Newsdesk Live and instead experiment with more focused requests, according to a report on journalism.co.uk. The Guardian’s national editor, Dan Roberts, said:

When we ask people to just suggest a news story, it’s such a huge subject people don’t really know where to start or what we might mean.

He contrasted that with a much more focused request when they asked readers to test their broadband speeds. They got 5,000 responses in three days.

As much as I applaud their experiments and their efforts to learn from them, it does worry me that we’re having to learn these lessons over and over again, and that news organisations are failing to learn lessons from user engagement projects in the past. I remember some of the early experiments we were asked to do by senior editors when I was at The Guardian, and I have to say, some editors put questions to the public that sounded too much like tasks for staff reporters. It is an unrealistic expectation for a member of the public to interrogate their Member of Parliament or for them to go and dispassionately cover a local government meeting. They seemed to have forgotten some of the lessons that made previous projects more successful.

In 2008 after Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, The Guardian asked readers to post messages in the form of pictures to the popular photo-sharing site, Flickr. The “Message for Obama” project was a great success. The Guardian not only posted the pictures online, but the newspaper even produced a book that readers could purchase, using a service called Blurb which makes it easy to produce small batches of books.

The projects that worked best were when we asked very specific things from our audience. Back in 2009, The Guardian technology editor Charles Editor asked readers on Twitter to help him gather all of the companies that technology company Oracle had bought. He used a Google Spreadsheet on the Guardian website that anyone could edit to collect the information. This was a great success.

Before I was at The Guardian, I was at the BBC, and the BBC has done a lot of smart thinking about audience engagement online and on air. In 2009, the BBC worked with the University of Cardiff to produce a comprehensive study of its use of user-generated content – comments, videos and images. The study found:

Specific calls to action are most useful for news gathering and when eliciting high-quality relevant comment.

Some key lessons about audience engagement and experimental projects:

• Ask your audience clear, focused questions, and if you want something from them, be clear about what you want.
• Don’t expect your audience to act like journalists or carry out tasks you’d assign to staff. Crowdsourcing shouldn’t be confused with outsourcing.
• Measure, learn and adapt continually.
• Remember the lessons you have learned. A lesson learned but forgotten is effort wasted.

The survey found that 47 percent of internet users in Brazil and 44 percent in Argentina read UGC on newspaper websites compared to only 35 percent in the UK and 26 percent in Germany. Latin Americans also submit articles or comments on the websites of newspaper publishers at higher rates than people in other regions, with 27 percent in Brazil and 26 percent in Argentina. Across the region, there was an increase from 11.9 percent to 23.4 percent of internet users engaging with UGC between 2010 and 2011, whereas the percentage of internet users in the UK and Germany submitting comments or articles to news sites declined over the same period, falling to 12 percent and 17 percent respectively.

Across Latin America, UGC engagement levels as well as blogging and posting behaviour vary significantly by country. According to Jimena Urquijo, VP Business Development of Kantar Media-TGI Latina, this depends on a mix of factors like internet penetration and the use of new devices to go online. “The larger the internet base, the more potential for UGC development,” she says, explaining Latin America’s lead in online interactivity by the region’s dramatic increase in internet accessibility over the last couple of years.

Overall the Latin American online population grew faster than any other region in 2011, rising 16 percent to 129.3 m in December 2011, according to the 2012 Latin American Digital Future in Focus report by ComScore. Brazil, the largest online market in Latin America, grew 20 percent in the past year to 40.5 m users, while Mexico’s online population surged 21 percent to 18.1 m. And Venezuela, which represents a relatively small online market at 2.9 m, achieved the highest rate of growth in the past year at 27 percent. As Urquijo explains, the path for this growth is paved by the increased usage of internet-enabled devices such as mobile phones, consoles and iPads. ComScore reports that internet usage on mobile phones and tablets continued to increase in 2011, with Puerto Rico leading the region with 7.7 percent of all digital traffic consumed away from a personal computer.

Another important element of the high level UGC engagement in Latin America, Urquijo emphasizes, is cultural. “Latin American consumers are outspoken, informed and have well rounded opinions,” she says. Close to 83 percent of Latin American internet users believe it is important to be well-informed. And they place less importance in trusting online media than in other regions. When asked how important it was that they trust the websites they visit, only 73 percent of internet users in Brazil and 71 percent in Argentina agreed that it was important, Kantar Media reports. In comparison, 82 percent thought trust was important in Saudi Arabia and 80 percent in Kuwait. This factor may help to explain the acceptance of and willingness to contribute to content production in the region.

The result is that even smaller Latin American markets, like Peru with 9.9 m internet users as of 2011, have embraced new communication forms like social networking and UCG. Peru is now one of the most engaged social networking markets worldwide along with four other Latin America countries – Argentina, Chile, Columbia and Mexico. Since 2008, Peru has had its own citizen-generated newspaper, Gua 3.0 – the first of its kind in the region – which aims to report facts that mainstream media miss.

This growing appetite for UGC presents an opportunity for news outlets to attract new audiences and build relationships with existing audiences. Providing consumers with easy ways to interact and contribute to the news-making process builds loyalty and can be an audience-building tool. Geoff Wicken, Head of TGO International at Kantar Media agrees:

Today’s digital world has enabled consumers to move from being passive recipients of news coverage to playing an interactive role in how news is distributed. While the doomsayers take this to signal the end of the traditional newspaper, savvy publishers understand that they need to encourage and engage with people providing content, and use it as means of underpinning their role in this ‘Brave New World’.