Adrian Van Klaveren, The BBC often encourages the general public who are "on the spot" when a news event occurs, to submit pictures or video. Do you have any plans to offer payment for this content in the future and will we ever see a time when BBC users are also encouraged to write their own reports on stories?
Asked by bonzo1 on Dec 03 2007 3:14:49 PM and supported by 21 members
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In terms of payment, generally not – we are asking people to contribute and our experience is that people are usually very keen to contribute to our coverage and be able to give their pictures, their accounts of the events they’ve actually seen. We’ve occasionally paid for particular content if we have it exclusively and so on, and that will continue, just as we have in the past with amateur video – the only difference is that nowadays there is just much more of it around, because most people have a mobile phone with a camera attached to it and can email it directly from there. It’s just an increase in volume of that but I think the principles are that generally we don’t have plans to pay for that sort of content – there would have to be a very specific reason why that would be the right thing to do. In terms of people writing their own sort of accounts of things, I think there is a place for that. There are two ways in which that really works – there are people who are experts on stories because they’ve got personal involvement, personal experience of it. If you want to hear their accounts because that helps inform your overall understanding of the story, it makes it actually a much more rounded account if you are able, through your website, to say “And here’s an account of a person who knows about this, who has experienced it, has lived through it” or whatever. That’s a good thing to have and in terms of people who witness particular things , you know, those accounts… they don’t just need to be a short email, if somebody feels that they are able to write their own particular account of it, that can be very powerful and very valuable to us. And there is this kind of opening up of the news that you can let people have the space to be able to do that, and you do get a difference of perspectives, a difference of style and so on. I don’t by any means think that it is the entire answer of what it is that people expect from us but I think its a part of it and I think its something that we want to encourage. Shrikala: So you would ask a journalist to go through what has been written to check that it is up to the standards of the BBC? Well, I think the key thing is for people who are reading it, is to understand the basis on which that account is there. If it is an account from somebody who has sent it to us, a member of our audience, I think that’s what needs to be clear to people. I think there is a danger of us for getting into “well we’re going to moderate everything, we’re going to edit everything, we’re going to make it all the same as everything else we would do through our own journalists”. I think you’ve got to make that distinction and to say that actually, this stands there in its own right as long as there are no particular legal defamation problems or anything like that with it – we should check for that. But beyond that I think our role for that sort of account is as a publisher of it, as opposed to people who are trying to edit it and make it conform to our own particular style, our own way of doing it, for the very real fact that if we start trying to do it that way- where we are trying to edit it in lots of different ways- we won’t have the capacity to produce very many of those accounts. It won’t actually achieve the kind of opening up, the kind of democratisation if you like, that actually is the reason for doing it. Because it will be subject to our capacity to be able to edit them much better that we’re very open with the audience, “this is the basis of this, the status of it, it’s not the same as something done by one of our journalists, but we think you might be interested in reading it”.