Media
Too much UGC can be a bad thing
Steve Outing, a long-time journalist and staffer with the Poynter Institute, has written a column about his venture into social news or “crowdsourced” local content — through a company called Enthusiast Group — and how it has since shut down. Steve makes some worthwhile points about why he thinks his attempt to blend professional content and “user-generated” content failed, and in a nutshell it appears to boil down to this: too much of the UGC just wasn’t good enough.
“In hindsight, I think we tried to rely too heavily on user submitted content. Even though a lot of it was really great, the overall experience was weak when compared to, say, reading a climbing or a mountain biking magazine filled with quality professional content throughout.”
And Steve says that he just didn’t have enough staff to generate the professional-level content that would make the site worthwhile, or sort through the user-generated stuff to get at the good stuff (”curating,” people like to call it now).
“We believed that having a core level of professional content –- from our site editors -– would be enough to attract a loyal following even if the user-submitted content wasn’t enough on its own. But I think we didn’t have nearly enough of that. If I had any money left to throw at the business, I’d hire more well-known athletes and adventurers, so that the core was a larger pool of professional content.”
Steve says he’s not giving up on UGC, but he thinks it’s bad to rely on it to carry too much of the freight for a content-related business.
“I’m not saying that user-submitted content isn’t worthwhile, let me be clear about that. I am saying that I think you can’t rely too much on it. And you need to filter out and highlight the best user content, while downplaying the visibility of the mediocre stuff.”
Steve’s venture isn’t the only UGC-based one to shut down, of course. Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere was a valiant effort that failed (I wrote about it here) and was later merged with Backfence, which then also failed. Jeremy Wagstaff of Loose Wire says that Steve’s experience reinforces the fact that there will always be a place for professional journalists. I don’t know why, but that makes me feel all warm inside :-)
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I think the argument has some merit, but ignores a lot of the advantages of social media as well...
Cheers,
Aidan
www.MappingTheWeb.com
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and I recently wrote a post taking BusinessWeek to task for doing just
that. But I think Steve's point is slightly different -- not so much
that all UGC is crap, but that you still need editors of some shape or
form to sift through things a bit and weed out some of the clutter.
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I'm not - GASP!! - getting all Keen-sian on you <insert other ideological purity assurances here>, just stating what ought to be reasonably obvious now. There is an ocean of crap out there, a lot of it is UGC, and sorting through it is proving to be awfully hard.
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side of the professional-UGC content divide is roughly equal. One
gets a lot more attention than the other, that's all -- in part
because we've gotten used to the kind that's been around forever, so
we don't really even see it any more.
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But perhaps more importantly, for every MSM contributor there are, oh, about a gajillion UGC contributors. Which means a much hard job of sifting through the crap. And the aggregation tools out there really do only filter on popularity, and while that may sometimes be a rough proxy for quality, Jennifer Lopez has proved beyond any doubt that that is often spectacularly *not* the case, and I don't really want to spend *that* much time immersed in material that suits the lowest common denominator / has the broadest possible appeal.
Jury's still out, IMO. Or perhaps more accurately, we really, really need tools to help us take out the garbage. Can we have them now, please?
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argument is a straw man at all. I think we've just become used to it
and so we don't really even notice any more, or we filter out the
worst of it ourselves.
I see MSM writers of all kinds doing virtually no research -- or only
enough to make the point they've already decided to make --
bit**-slapping other writers (albeit with larger words in some cases)
and generally behaving badly in all sorts of ways. We've just come to
accept that as part of the MSM, and yet UGC is supposed to somehow be
better than that.
And while there may be more crap, there's more good stuff too --
although I agree we need help finding it.
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