Is reality becoming more real? The rise and rise of UGC

• The term 'citizen journalist' refers to the fact that the audience are able to use new media technologies such as mobile phones and video camera in order to capture events and broadcast exclusive footage on the news and are not passive consumers of news.

• One of the first examples of news being generated by 'ordinary people' was through the use of video cameras in 1991. After being captured by the police following a high speed chase, Rodney King, an African-American was surrounded by police officers, who tasered him and beat him with clubs. The event was filmed by George Holliday, an onlooker from his apartment window. The home-video footage made prime-time news and became an international media sensation, and a focus for complaints about police racism towards African-Americans.

• Nowadays, most news organisations offer different formats for participation for the audience, these include:
  

1. Message boards
2. Chat rooms,
   
3. Q&A, polls,
   
4. Have your says
   
5. Blogs with comments enabled (allow audience feedback and responses to news stories)
   
6. Social media sites (Bebo, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook).
   
7. UGC sites to access news: Wikipedia news, Google news and YouTube score highly in terms of where people go to get their news.

• On of the main differences between professional shot footage and that of UGC is that the first-hand view (UGC), rather than professionally shot footage from behind police lines, is often more hard-hitting and emotive.
  

• A gatekeeper has the job of deciding what is and isn’t news, and what will and won’t be broadcast on prime time television. Also, the gatekeeper (s) can also filter out irrelevant and misleading content , such as photos of kittens etc.

• Over the years, the role of the gatekeeper has changed, as the independent media on the web, e.g. the blogosphere, provides an opportunity for independent, often minority and niche views and news to reach a wide audience. The internet has made gate keeping more harder, as the vast number of websites and online sources for information such as Wikipedia, make it harder for gatekeepers to filter information which is untrustworthy or valid. In effect websites could be overrun by bigots or fools, by those who shout loudest, and those who have little else to do but make posts , therefore much of the unmoderated content could be unreliable.
  

• Generally, one of the main concerns held by journalists over the rise of UGC is that there will be fewer jobs for journalists, as the big institutions will make money from UGC by managing and processing the content.