User Generated Content Fallacy and Opportunity

User Generated Content (UGC) is the buzzword in the news industry with hopes to fill a news hole gap caused by staff reductions. Had media companies used UGC the way it is intended to be used, content quality would have improved years ago.
UGC has not filled the gap in most media companies and is actually causing a falling off of engaged readers, many of whom express their frustrations in letters and emails to media leaders and demonstrate their lack of support by reducing their reading time or cancelling subscriptions altogether.
The consumer doesn’t want to pay for UGC that doesn’t serve a purpose in their world other than to fill space that normally would have had a reporter’s by-line.
To be effective, UGC has to be mined with a specific purpose. It has to be driven by the need to seek out and provide expertise that news staff does not have – either due to research limitations, familiarity with subject matter or experience.
In the rush to make reporters and photographers into multi-media journalists tasked with covering all things in all manner, the news companies have lost a focus that consumers depend on; that is, a driving force to uncover news that impacts reader's lives.
Leaders in the newsroom have had a new concept in journalism shoved down their throats and find themselves having to choose between good journalism and content quotas based on a cookie cutter approach that has resulted in “Mall-izination” of the newsroom.
Each community has its hot points and each news opportunity should be looked at differently in how to best tell the story.
There are no goals and directions handed out to the newsroom for incorporating UGC into the news hole. The goals state the encouragement of UGC, but not the value it can bring to a story. Community expertise is ignored while valuable print space is given to shallow and useless content because editors and reporters are not instructed on how to seek out quality UGC.
Reporters need to feel empowered to aggressively pursue a story by utilizing numerous individuals with information and expertise. In the past, reporters contacted one or two immediate sources for their story. Today's social media provides a means for invaluable content from the community through online formats that walk a source through a series of questions that can be returned to the reporter with the click of a button. We’ll cover more on that at a later post.