Amateur Footage: A Global Study of User-Generated Content in TV

Funded by The Tow Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Tow Center for Digital Journalism A Tow/Knight Report AMATEUR FOOTAGE:

A GLOBAL STUDY OF USER-GENERATED CONTENT IN TV AND ONLINE-NEWS OUTPUT

CLAIRE WARDLE, PH.D.

SAM DUBBERLEY, M.A.

PETE BROWN, PH.D.

PHASE 1 REPORT APRIL 2014

Funded by The Tow Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Tow Center for Digital Journalism A Tow/Knight Report AMATEUR FOOTAGE:

A GLOBAL STUDY OF USER-GENERATED CONTENT IN TV AND ONLINE-NEWS OUTPUT

CLAIRE WARDLE, PH.D.

SAM DUBBERLEY, M.A.

PETE BROWN, PH.D.

PHASE 1 REPORT APRIL 2014

About the Authors

Claire Wardle has a Ph.D. in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She started her career at Cardiff University, where she undertook a year-long research project on UGC at the BBC. In 2009, she took what she thought would be a short break to design the social media training programme for BBC News in 2009. Since then she has been training journalists around the world on social newsgath-ering and verification, including a year working with the social media news agency Storyful.

www.clairewardle.com | @cwardle

Sam Dubberley has over ten years experience in broadcast news. He is an independent media researcher and adviser—working on a variety of media projects. He was head of the Eurovision News Exchange from 2010 to 2013, managing the world’s largest exchange of television news content. He was a bulletin editor for Bloomberg Television.

www.samdubberley.net | @samdubberley

Pete Brown completed his Ph.D. at Cardiff University, School of Journal-ism, Media and Cultural Studies in 2013. Since then he has worked inde-pendently on a number of different research projects, including a recent examination of gender and representation on BBC Local radio.

@beteprown

http://www.clairewardle.com

https://twitter.com/@cwardle

http://www.samdubberley.net

https://twitter.com/@samdubberley

https://twitter.com/@beteprown

Acknowledgements

First off, we would like to thank the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School for supporting this project—Emily, Taylor and Lauren in par-ticular. With their help, a crazy idea on a Skype call has become something that will actually provide the news industry with concrete numbers about their use of UGC. We hope the research will act as a foundation for conversations and will provide support and suggestions for best practice. We would also like to thank the interna-tional cooperation team at NHK in Tokyo for recording three weeks of their broad-casts for us. John, Sam’s step-dad, was another who helped us by recording CNN for us when we had lost all hope that we could find a way to capture it from our respective locations of Istanbul and Malaga, Spain. And, finally, thanks to all those who took time out of their schedules to talk to us about UGC and how they use it in their news bulletins. The conversation was interesting and thoughtful every time.

Table of Contents

Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Sample . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Research Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Principle Findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

How much UGC does the 24-hour news industry . . . . . . 13 use online and on-air?

In which types of stories is the 24-hour news industry . . . . 15 most likely to use UGC?

How does the 24-hour news industry use UGC? . . . . . . 22

Why this Matters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Endnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Columbia Journalism School | TOW CENTER FOR DIGITAL JOURNALISM

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Executive Summary

Aim of the Research

The aim of this research is to understand how much User-Generated Con-tent (UGC) is used on air and online by 24-hour news channels, why edi-tors and journalists of these news outlets choose to use it, and under what conditions it is employed. The study intends to provide a holistic under-standing of the use of UGC by international broadcast news channels.

Methodology

The research has been split into quantitative and qualitative phases. This report focuses solely on the quantitative phase, and provides an in-depth examination of how much UGC was used by eight international news broadcasters on air and online across a three-week period. To collect this data, the eight selected channels were recorded for eight hours per day for 21 days. This, accounting for technical drop-outs, offered 1,164 hours of news output, which were coded according to parameters intended to answer the research questions. The second, qualitative part of the research involves interviews with at least 60 news managers, editors, and journal-ists—including, but not limited to, the broadcasters coded. The product of both sections will become a comprehensive report about the use of UGC among international news channels.

Amateur Footage: A Global Study of User-Generated Content in TV and Online-News Output

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Research Questions

As well as counting the exact quantity of UGC that was used on air, each individual piece of UGC was coded according to the following criteria: whether stories integrated at least one form of UGC, whether the news organizations used video or photographs, whether the channels recog-nized content as UGC, and whether they credited the source or uploader when using UGC.

Conclusions

There are two main conclusions from this initial phase of research.

1. UGC is used by news organizations daily, but only when other content is not available to tell the story.

2. News organizations are poor and inconsistent in labeling content as UGC and crediting the individual who captured the content.

Our data showed more similarities than differences across television and Web output, with troubling practices across both platforms. The best use of UGC was online, mostly because the Web provides opportunities for integrating UGC into news output like live blogs and topic pages.


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Introduction

This research is a global study exploring the integration of user-generated content (UGC) into the output of some of the most watched cross-border 24-hour news channels, both on television and online. Television news organizations’ reliance on UGC is unquestionable, and while there have been a number of studies about UGC and news,1 there is no systematic, quantitative analysis of how UGC is being used by broadcasters at scale.

Anecdotal evidence from newsrooms suggests that although very dramatic UGC has always been sought and used, the past three years have seen a marked rise in this type of content appearing on our screens. Over the past decade some of the world’s most important news stories have been cov-ered using photographs or video shot by eyewitnesses. From photos taken on camera phones by passengers being led to safety through the under-ground tunnels in the immediate aftermath of the London bombings on July 7, 2005, to the videos of police shooting protestors in Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in early 2014, UGC has become an increasingly regular feature of news output both on television and the Web.

Citizen journalists, non-professionals with an interest in documenting news events, have taken some of these pictures and videos, but indeed many have simply been shot by “accidental journalists”—people with a camera or smartphone on hand, who happened to be in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time.

Rarely do these people recognize the value of their footage. Instead of con-tacting news oranizations directly, they want to share what they have seen with friends and family via the social Web. As Anthony De Rosa (ex-social media editor for Reuters and now managing editor for Circa) writes, “The


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first thought of the [uploader] is usually not: ‘I need to share this with a major TV news network,’ because they don’t care about traditional televi-sion news networks or more likely they’ve never heard of them. They have, however, heard of the Internet and that’s where they decide to share it with the world.”2 Amateur content-capturers have their own audiences to think about now.

The causality behind this phenomenon of mainstream news integrating UGC into its output is multi-factored. First, there’s global, mobile phone penetration. Phones now have sophisticated cameras, meaning very simply that more people have the ability to document news events well. Secondly, the universal popularity of the Web and increasingly cheaper access to it means content can be shared immediately. This provides savvy journalists with opportunities to discover breaking-news content and communicate in real time with the people who have witnessed the event firsthand. Third, the Syrian conflict has normalized, so to speak, the use of content filmed by people unaffiliated with a news organization.3 While the innate power of some of the UGC from Syria might have pervaded the news no matter what, the limitations placed on journalists to enter the country or move around freely in this case forced even the most reluctant of journalists and editors to use UGC—because it was impossible to tell the story otherwise.

This research has two phases. First, it captures a quantitative analysis of news output on eight television news channels and their respective Web sites, designed to provide a benchmark for the amount of UGC currently being used in news output worldwide. The second involves qualitative interviews with journalists, editors, and news managers to discuss the issues raised by the use of UGC around workflow, verification, rights, pay-ment, and ethics. This report focuses solely on the first, quantitative phase of the research.


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Definition

The phrase user-generated content has always been an unpopular one.4 Unfortunately no one has managed to create an alternative that adequately describes the phenomenon. For the purposes of this study, we define UGC as photographs and videos captured by people who are not professional journalists and are unrelated to news organizations. It does not include comments (either posted underneath a news article or those posted to social networks) integrated into coverage.

In addition, statements posted on social networks by newsmakers (e.g., celebrities, politicians, sports people, or institutions like the United Nations) that are using social networks to bypass traditional public rela-tions channels are also not classified as UGC. So, for example, a golfer posting a picture of a new set of clubs he’s received from his sponsor does not qualify. On the other hand, a picture tweeted by a soccer player of him-self watching the 2014 World Cup draw with his teammates is included, as it is not classified as P.R. (See Figure 1).

Figure 1: Picture tweeted by professional soccer player Edin Dzeko during the FIFA World Cup 2014 draw


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Methodology

Content analysis was the methodology used to analyze the output online and on-air. The two lead researchers, Claire Wardle and Sam Dubber-ley, coded the television output. Research assistant Pete Brown analyzed the Web sites. The content analysis only began when Claire and Sam had reached a 95 percent agreement during pilot coding sessions. There was continuous dialogue between all three researchers about examples that raised questions or issues.

The majority of content was not explicitly labeled as UGC, so the research-ers had to investigate many individual cases to verify UGC. This was achieved by cross-referencing content with items available on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, as well as cross-referencing with those on the Reuters, AP, or Storyful portals.

When the content’s origin was still unclear, there was a group discussion about the photo or video. Some of the content from more remote locations often looked at first glance like UGC, but under closer inspection was often shown to be footage captured by a local news channel with less sophisticated video equipment and then distributed by one of the main two television news agencies to their clients. One of the best clues that a piece of content was filmed by a professional was the raw skill of the camera operator. Often, professional chops could be identified—such as the way the camera panned slowly across the action rather than the quick, jerky or uneven movements associated with camera-phone video taken by amateurs.

Ultimately, the researchers worked as hard as possible to ensure consistent and accurate coding, but acknowledge there is undoubtedly a small margin of error caused by the difficulty of coding UGC that wasn’t labeled.


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Sample

For the research, we chose the eight 24-hour news channels listed in Table 1. The sample was designed to include channels from around the world with an international audience (i.e., the target audience of the channel was cross-border, excluding major 24-hour channels like Sky News in the United Kingdom, for instance). Our intention was to analyze seven full days of output—168 hours from each of the eight channels, equaling 1,344 hours.

The inbuilt repetition of rolling television news meant we didn’t want to analzse 24 hours of output from the same day, so we sampled eight hours from each day for 21 days. We also rotated the start time, so on the first day we recorded from 8 a.m.–4 p.m., on the second day from 4 p.m.–midnight, and on the third from midnight–8 a.m. This pattern was repeated for the 21 days. Recording began on Monday, November 25, 2013 and ended on Sunday, December 15, 2013.

Table 1: News organizations included in the sample

Channel Location of Headquarters Language

Al Jazeera Arabic Doha, Qatar Arabic

Al Jazeera English Doha, Qatar English

BBC World London, United Kingdom English

CNN International Atlanta, United States English

Euronews Lyon, France English

France 24 Paris, France French

NHK World Tokyo, Japan English

Telesur Caracas, Venezuela English


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Of the eight news organizations, only the BBC archives its own broadcasts (for internal purposes) enabling us to gain direct access. We therefore had to record the other seven channels as they were broadcast. We achieved this through a variety of methods, but it did result in some outages caused by power cuts or live streams dropping out in the middle of the night. As a result, our final sample was 1,164 hours and 10 minutes (87 percent of our original target).

We analyzed all 21 days of the recordings for all channels apart from Al Jazeera Arabic. For Al Jazeera Arabic we coded five days, chosen at ran-dom, from the 21-day sample. The reason for this was the difficulty of cod-ing Arabic output without knowledge of the language. It was impossible to check whether the presenters or reporters were describing the UGC in a particular way, or whether the captions on screen were relevant. The use of UGC was also significantly greater than any other channel we coded, and, in fact, even during five days of output from Al Jazeera Arabic there were more instances of UGC than from any other channel except Al Jazeera English over the 21 days.

All eight Web sites were captured at 6 p.m. (local time for the location of their headquarters), for all 21 days. In total, the content on 2,254 Web pages was analyzed. Only five days were analyzed,5 the same five random days chosen for the Al Jazeera Arabic analysis. This was due to the sheer amount of content on each of the sites. The average number of links on each homepage every day was 56. Some were less populated. NHK World, for example, only had, on average, 13 links out to news stories. CNN Inter-national, on the other hand, had an average of 119 links out to different stories on its homepage. On some of these story pages, there were up to 11 three- to five-minute videos included on just that single page. All of these had to be combed for UGC.


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Unit of Analysis

For the television output, every individual piece of UGC was counted. If a three-minute television package on Syria included a compilation of 10 separate pieces of UGC edited together, these were considered to be 10 dif-ferent examples of UGC, and each was examined separately. Each piece of UGC was coded for different characteristics. The main ones were: duration, format (video or photograph), story, if the content was described as UGC either on-screen or through a voiceover (with descriptions such as “source: youtube.com,” “unverified pictures,” or “amateur vidéo”), and if the content was credited (either on-screen, in captions, or descriptions online). For the online analysis, again every piece of UGC was coded for whether it was an embedded Vine video, or a piece of activist video included in a television package uploaded to the news Web site.


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Research Questions

There were three key questions that framed this phase of the research.

1. How much UGC does the 24-hour news industry use online and on-air?

2. In which types of stories is the 24-hour news industry most likely to use UGC?

3. How does the 24-hour news industry use UGC?

a. Are photographs or videos more likely to be used? b. Is the content described as UGC? c. Is the uploader of the content credited?


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Principle Findings

The research found that UGC is used across the 24-hour news industry on a daily basis. The tendency is to use it only when there are no other pictures available. Throughout our sampling period, all channels included UGC to report the Syrian conflict. Indeed, for some news organizations Syria was the only story for which they included UGC. However, the man-ner in which UGC fills a gap was also evident in the way it was used in the very early stages of breaking-news stories. For example, a helicopter crash in Glasgow happened very late at night (GMT) on November 29, 2013 and UGC was featured heavily as the story broke. As professional pictures from their own camera crews or news agencies appeared on Saturday morning, broadcasters chose to update their packages and reports with these, sub-stituting out the UGC.

However, there were instances when stories were run only because there was UGC to provide imagery. During our sampled time frame, secretly filmed UGC exposed serious police brutality in Egypt and the Ukraine, a dive rescue team unexpectedly found a man alive in a sunken ship and their underwater cameras told the story of the rescue, and a group of children in Damascus were shown talking to a camera in the street before narrowly escaping being hit by a mortar shell that landed nearby.

Overall, all news organizations regularly failed to label or describe content as UGC and crediting was rare. The majority of news organizations, both online and on television, rarely described where the pictures had come from, acknowledged that people unconnected to the organization had filmed them, or gave credit to the uploader. Verification processes were almost never discussed, apart from a couple of times when the viewer or reader was told that the pictures were unverified.


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There are more similarities across TV and Web output than differences, highlighting troubling practices across both platforms. However, there were some shining examples online, particularly in live blogs. The web also provided more opportunities for more innovative integrations of UGC into news output, and these will be explored in more detail in the final report.


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Results

RQ1: How much does the television news industry use UGC online and on air?

While 21 days of television content were analyzed from seven channels, only five days of output were evaluated from Al Jazeera Arabic, so the data has to be compared separately. In addition, only five days of Web content were analyzed, so again this must be considered separately.

As Table 2 on the next page demonstrates, an average6 of 11 pieces of UGC were used every day on television by news organizations. The average length of a piece of UGC on screen was 11 seconds.

It is very evident from this table how much Al Jazeera Arabic employs UGC, compared to the other channels. Its daily average number of pieces of UGC was 51 (compared to 11 for the other seven channels), and the average length of a piece of UGC was 16 seconds (compared to 11 seconds for the other seven channels).


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Table 2: Amount of UGC included in coverage

TV

Web7 Channels (excluding Al Jazeera Arabic)

Al Jazeera Arabic only

21 days sampled 5 days sampled 5 days sampled

Overall number of UGC pieces used

1,858 257 758

Average number of UGC pieces used per channel per day

11.06 51.04 18.95

Total number of minutes

5 hours, 45 minutes 1 hour, 9 minutes N/A

Average length of each piece of UGC used

11 seconds 16 seconds N/A

Average length of UGC used per chan-nel per day

2 minutes, 5 seconds13 minutes, 36

secondsN/A

Table 3 demonstrates a significant range, in terms of how different chan-nels used UGC. Focusing on the television output, Al Jazeera Arabic used the most UGC in the period sampled with a daily average of 51.4 pieces. (If the daily average was multiplied over 21 days, there would have been 1,079 pieces of UGC aired over the 21-day period on Al Jazeera Arabic alone).


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Table 3: Comparison of the amount of UGC used by news organization

TV Web

Overall number of

items

Daily average Overall number of

items

Daily average

High Use Channels

Al Jazeera Arabic

257 51.4 55 11.0

Al Jazeera English

386 18.4 5* 1.0

BBC World 254 12.1 78 15.6

CNN International

356 17.0 450 90.0

Euronews 415 19.8 53 10.6

France 24 270 12.9 114 22.8

Low Use Channels

NHK 144 6.9 0 0

Telesur 34 1.6 3 0.6

Totals 2,115 758

In terms of Web output, CNN International included the most UGC online. It is important to stress, however, that this is partly because dif-ferent Web sites had different numbers of links on each homepage. CNN International had the most links out to stories from its homepage, with a daily average of 119 links, compared with 65 links to stories on BBC World and 13 links to stories on the NHK homepage.

RQ2: In which types of stories is the 24-hour news industry most likely to use UGC?

During the first phase of analysis, the story related to each piece of UGC was noted. For some stories, such as the riots in Singapore, it was a one-off event. For ongoing stories, such as Syria, the story descriptor involved something like, “Syria—chemical weapons inspection,” “Syria—Geneva II


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talks announced,” or “Syria—bombing in Aleppo.” During the second phase of analysis, these descriptions were post-coded, so that one all-encompass-ing description could be given to similar stories. Anything related to Syria was labeled, “Syria conflict.”

On television, over the 21 days, 75 different stories were told using some element of UGC. On the Web, over just five days, 115 individual sub-jects included at least one piece of UGC. Intuitively, this variance can be explained by the structural differences between television and the Web. Online news needs to be refreshed and updated constantly and has near unlimited space in terms of its different Web pages, whereas television fills a limited, and immovable amount of time.

The news Web sites had specific design features that encouraged depth and breadth in reporting. One was live blogs and the other was topic pages. Live blogs are featured on Al Jazeera English, BBC World, CNN Interna-tional, euronews (which used an embedded Storify as a form of live blog-ging), and France 24. Figure 2 presents an example from BBC World from December 6, 2013, called “UK tidal surge: As it happened.” It shows the

Figure 2: “UK tidal surge: As it happened,” BBC World, December 6, 2013


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impact of a serious storm on the United Kingdom. Within this one story there are 22 separate pieces of UGC (one television package that includes a UGC video,7 six photos from Twitter, and 15 photos emailed directly to the BBC). Television could not have included this level of depth in its coverage of the storm.

The other format we investigated was topic pages. These pages had curated content around a similar topic displayed in one place. On topics like Syria, formats like this on the Web provide far more flexibility in terms of sto-rytelling, and allow more context and explanation. BBC World and CNN International had topic pages for Syria. Figure 3 shows an example of one built by CNN, specifically exploring the refugee experience of Syrians.

Over the 21 days reviewed on television, 73 different stories used at least one piece of UGC to illustrate events. In comparison, over only five days on the Web, 115 different stories included at least one piece of UGC. Table 3, however, shows that the main story types were similar.

Figure 3: topic page, “Crisis in Syria: The Refugees,” CNN


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Table 4: The main types of stories covered using some form of UGC

Story Type TV Web

Number of UGC items

% of total Number of UGC items

% of total

Conflict/ War/Military

925 44% 161 21%

Explosion (terrorism or other causes)

50 2% 9 1%

Other 281 13% 285 38%

Protest 364 17% 152 20%

Vehicular crashes

449 21% 80 11%

Weather 46 2% 71 9%

Total 2,115 100% 758 100%

On the Web, the most common category of news employing UGC was “other.” During our analysis, the Web ran a number of feature stories, like “Pictures of the audience dressed as Doctor Who characters” or “Pictures people had taken during vacations to North Korea,”8 that were inundated with UGC.

Perhaps one of the most surprising statistics was the relative absence of content around weather. People are often quick to dismiss UGC as sim-ply something used to illustrate serious weather conditions. Apart from severe storms in the United Kingdom and the United States during the coding period, which prompted some usage of UGC, especially online, weather-related UGC did not feature heavily. It should also be noted that the weather-related disaster of Typhoon Hainan in the Philippines was classified as individual stories.


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While the Web can’t be directly compared, because only five days of con-tent were analyzed, when you drill down to the specific stories covered using UGC on television during the sampling frame, similar patterns are visible.

Table 5: The specific stories covered using some form of UGC

TV Web

Overall story Number of items Overall story Number of items

1 Syria 842 Syria 155

2 Glasgow helicopter crash

349 Egypt protests 52

3 Ukraine protests 119 Ukraine protests 52

4 Egypt protests 99 Glasgow helicopter crash

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5 Black Friday 85 Bangkok protests 25

Of the five stories with the most UGC on television (Syria, the Glasgow helicopter crash, Ukraine protests, Egypt protests, and Black Friday), four of the top five stories on the Web were the same, apart from Black Fri-day coverage, which did not appear with the same volume online. This is because Black Friday fell on November 29, which was not one of the five randomly sampled dates. Instead, the protests in Bangkok, Thailand, received coverage on four out of the five sampled days.

But these pure numbers alone do not accurately reflect what was happen-ing over the three-week period. When stories are mapped against date, the resulting graph (Figure 4) shows the three clearest patterns from the research.


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Figure 5: The top news stories containing UGC on the Web

1. UGC was used to tell the story of the Syrian conflict almost every day

Content related to the Syria conflict appeared almost every day during the sample period on at least one of the channels under analysis. Covering the Syrian conflict has been an ongoing challenge for news editors. Limitations placed on foreign journalists to enter or move freely within the country has


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meant news organizations have had to rely upon UGC as a way of telling the story. This is reflected in the consistent presence of the green column in Figure 4 and the blue column in Figure 5. Of the 2,115 times UGC items coded as appearing on television over the three weeks, 842 were out of Syria. However, those 842 pieces were broadcast over the entire period. In contrast, all 349 of the UGC items identified during the Glasgow helicopter crash appeared on November 29 or November 30, and December 2.

2. Glasgow helicopter crash was a breaking-news story where UGC filled the gap while news organizations waited for other pictures.

The yellow column in Figure 4 represents the amount of UGC used in the coverage of the Glasgow helicopter crash. The crash occurred late in the evening (GMT) of November 29, causing a peak in UGC on November 30, when pictures first emerged. Of all of the one-off stories (i.e., not stories like Syria, Ukraine, and the Thailand protests, which were ongoing during the three-week sample period), coverage of the helicopter crash included the most UGC use.

There was a clear peak on November 30, because, in the first hours after the crash, most news organizations relied on pictures taken by eyewitnesses and posted on Twitter. For example, BBC World broke the story at 22:08 GMT, and over the following three hours it used 35 minutes and 15 seconds of UGC. It is important to note that those 35 minutes were made up of four pictures sourced from Twitter and an unidentified 13-second video of a police cordon. While the economic element of UGC is not part of this phase of research, it has to be acknowledged that 35 minutes of free content is a significant amount of money for a television news channel to save.


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The crash happened late on a Friday night in Europe, a time when news-rooms are traditionally lightly staffed. However, as the story developed, news agencies and the news organizations themselves were able to get their crews in place in Glasgow. When professional images started to come in, the reliance on UGC was noticeably reduced.

3. Nelson Mandela’s death had a direct impact on the amount of UGC appearing on the television channels.

Nelson Mandela’s death, which was announced late in the evening (GMT) of December 5, directly impacted the amount of UGC that was used. Over-all, a very small amount was employed during the coverage of Mandela’s death, and the blanket coverage on almost all channels meant other stories were not relayed with the same level of detail. In the immediate aftermath of the announcement, the channels switched to their long-prepared obitu-aries and, when in place, were happy to go live to correspondents in South Africa. As this was a breaking-news event into which news channels had invested a lot of money over several years, the channels went into autopilot without the need to use UGC.

RQ3a: Are photographs or videos more likely to be used?

What is apparent is that UGC is used when other content is not available to tell a story. Television requires moving pictures. Web formats encour-age the use of still images, whether through photo galleries, live blogs, or a still image to illustrate a digital article. Therefore, we expected significantly more photographs to be used online, when compared to television. This wasn’t the case. It was roughly even.


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Table 6: Amount of photographs and videos used on TV and the Web

Television Web

Video 70% 49%

Photographs 30% 51%

It is not really fair, however, to compare those Web sites associated with television news channels with news Web sites overall. There was a great deal of video posted to these Web sites and in almost all cases they were running the same packages online that had appeared on television. It would be interesting to extend this research to newspaper Web sites, as well as Web-only news organizations such as the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed.

RQ3b: Was the content described as UGC in some form?

As part of the analysis, we examined whether each piece of UGC was described as content produced by someone unrelated to the newsroom, i.e. not a professional journalist. In addition, we examined whether the uploader was given a credit onscreen or online. Describing the content as UGC took a number of forms (e.g., onscreen captions of “amateur footage,” “activist video,” or “youtube.com”). Sometimes UGC content was obvious because it was embedded online, so the fact that it was a picture from Twitter or a video from YouTube was evident. Alternatively, each televi-sion channel had a program dedicated to social media. On Al Jazeera Eng-lish, it was The Stream, on BBC World, it was BBC Trending, on France 24 there were two: Les Observateurs and Sur Le Net. These programs would play a YouTube video showing the full YouTube page. And sometimes there wouldn’t be a specific caption, but the reporter or presenter would use lan-guage such as, “These pictures have emerged online.”


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As Table 6 illustrates, on television the majority of UGC was not described or labeled specifically as content that had been created by someone unre-lated to the newsroom. It is worth noting that it is much clearer on Web sites that content has been sourced from the social Web, and is therefore UGC. This is due to the structural character that exists online, which makes it possible to embed content directly from social networks like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, or Vine. When the descriptions are compared by channel, it was clear that some channels were more likely to describe con-tent as UGC than others.

Table 7: Percentage of content NOT described as UGC in some way

TV* Web

Percentage of content NOT described as UGC

74% 30%

* It’s important to note that this data does not include Al Jazeera Arabic as it was impossible for us to know whether the captions on screen or the voiceovers were describing the content as UGC.

Table 7 shows that 51 percent of CNN International content on television was not described explicitly as UGC. Telesur didn’t label any content as UGC and NHK World failed to label 97 percent of the UGC it used.


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Table 8: Total number of pieces of content not labeled or described as UGC

TV Web

Total pieces of UGC Percentage Total pieces of UGC Percentage

Al Jazeera English 386 61% 5 0%

BBC World 254 81% 78 45%

CNN 355 51% 450 13%

Euronews 415 92% 53 30%

France 24 270 75% 114 51%

NHK 144 97% 0 0%

Telesur 34 100% 3 33%

* It’s important to note that this data does not include Al Jazeera Arabic as it was impossible for us to know whether the captions on screen or the voiceovers were describing the content as UGC.

There were a number of different ways UGC was described by different news organizations on television as well as online.

Table 9: Ways in which UGC was described

Type of written credit or spoken description

TV Web

No description that content was UGC

74% 30%

Via youtube.com/ facebook.com/twitter.com

9% 30%

User-Generated Content 0% 20%

Eyewitness photo or video/footage

3% 11%

Amateur footage/video or photo

8% 9%

These pictures can’t be verified/unverified pictures

2% less than 1%

Other 4% less than 1%


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Figures 6, 7, and 8 are examples of the different ways UGC was described. BBC World used “Unverified Pictures,” Euronews used “Amateur Footage,” and Al Jazeera English used “youtube.com/activist video.”

Figure 6: BBC World, December 8, 2013, 21:07 GMT Singapore Riots, Credit: BJ Chin www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj2R7-JBRpI

Figure 7: Euronews, December 3, 2013, 07:07 GMT Syria

Figure 8: Al Jazeera English November 26, 2013, 08:21 GMT Aleppo, Syria


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RQ3c: Were the people who uploaded the content credited?

The issue of crediting is a significant one, and will be covered in much more detail in the final phase of our reporting. The intention with this quantita-tive analysis was to ascertain exactly how frequently uploaders were being credited on television and online. Table 9 suggests that credits were regu-larly added when UGC was integrated into output.

Table 10: Percentage of content where the uploader was credited in some form

TV* Web*

49% 72%

* This data does not include Al Jazeera Arabic as it was impossible for us (as non-Arabic speakers) to know whether the captions on screen or the voiceovers were describing the content as UGC.

However, these numbers don’t provide an accurate sense of what was hap-pening. Many of the videos uploaded from Syria that were used by news organizations were uploaded by activist groups. They watermark the vid-eos with logos before uploading to YouTube. This means that the content is “credited” without the broadcasters having to do anything themselves (see Figures 7 and 8). As Table 12 illustrates, 41 percent of the content within the sampling period had a watermark or logo added by the uploader.


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Table 11: Who added the credit to the content?

TV* Web*

Percentage of stories per

channel where the credit was added by the news organization

Total number of pieces of UGC that were used on television

Percentage where the

uploader credit was added by the news organization

Total number of pieces of UGC that were used

online

Al Jazeera English 1% 386 100% 5

BBC World 9% 254 49% 78

CNN International 81% 356 79% 450

Euronews 21% 415 13% 53

France 24 1% 270 15% 114

NHK 4% 144 0 0

Telesur 0% 34 0 3

* This data does not include Al Jazeera Arabic as it was impossible for us (as non-Arabic speakers) to know whether the captions on screen or the voiceovers were describing the content as UGC.

In Figures 7 and 8, the activist logos were accompanied by a caption added by the broadcaster explaining that this was content unrelated to the news organization. However, on 356 occasions (52 percent), a video with water-marked logo had no further explanation about what the video was or who had uploaded the content (See Figures 9 and 10).

A viewer or reader could assume the logo in the top left hand corner was the logo of another television station. We argue that this type of content should be clearly described as UGC and the name of the activist group should be spelled out. Because of the number of Syrian activist groups that add their own logo, which could be described as a form of credit, we wanted to examine how frequently the news organizations themselves actively added a credit.


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Table 12: Percentage of the content per channel where the news organization actively credited the uploader when it used a piece of content

TV Web

Percentage of content where the uploader added a credit to the content themselves (e.g., watermark or logo)

41% 23%

Percentage of content where the news organization actively added the credit

17% 56%

As Table 11 illustrates, looking at TV only, CNN International adds these credits frequently (81 percent of the time). The rest of the news organiza-tions credit very infrequently. For Al Jazeera English and France 24, only one percent of the UGC output had a credit onscreen, which was added by the broadcaster. Crediting on the Web is more common, although not universal.

Figure 9: BBC World News, December 7, 2013, 10:22 GMT

Figure 10: France 24, November 25, 2013, 21:40 GMT


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Why This Matters

After much research into UGC, we can conclude that UGC is treated like any other source.9 News organizations still act as gatekeepers, filter-ing and aggregating UGC in ways they believe are useful and valuable to their audience.

While the terms “user-generated content” may be soothing to journalists, reassuring them and the industry at large that UGC does not offer any par-ticular threat to the status quo, what it also means is that the considerations which are necessary when dealing with sourced content are frequently ignored. A picture filmed by an eyewitness on his or her camera and uploaded to Twitter is not the same as a picture filmed by a stringer10 who is then paid a standard fee by a newsroom. Similarly, it is not the same as a video sourced from, for example, Reuters or APTN, news agencies that are paid a monthly or annual subscription fee for their content by news organizations.

Obviously, if the person who filmed the video or took the picture wants to remain anonymous, a newsroom has a responsibility to not only ensure the content is not credited, but also to privatize the person’s identity during the newsgathering process. In the majority of cases, however, the people who take a photo or films a video during a breaking-news event are simply too shocked to know how to respond to the deluge of news requests for use that come to them via their social networks and have no idea that they own the copyright, and, in almost all cases, grant usage rights.

It is reassuring that journalists now know that they should be seeking per-mission for the use of content sourced from the social Web, and in almost all cases during our sampling period, we could trace individual reporters’ requests for use from Twitter (far less on YouTube, however).


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But while permission was sought and granted (Figure 11), credit was very rarely added to the content when it was used on screen or online. This was even the case when the UGC was distributed by Reuters and APTN. In the instance of the Glasgow helicopter crash, the agencies advised of the need to credit the uploader (Figure 12) in the distributed “dopesheet”,11 but this request was not upheld by the broadcasters in our sample.

Figure 11: Requests by news organizations on Twitter to use eyewitness pictures by Twitter user @scotscribbler of the Glasgow helicopter crash. It is worth noting the last tweet in this screen grab, which

shows how worldwide distribution deals can be sought and, at times, agreed upon in 140 characters.

Figure 12: Reuters dopesheet asking clients to credit uploaders accompanying UGC content distributed on the Glasgow helicopter crash


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By treating UGC as any other source, it also means that it is not described as such to the audience. While the issue of running unverified pictures is discussed by journalists privately, these challenges are kept from the audi-ence. Viewers don’t know that what they are looking at is sourced from someone unrelated to the news organization, and in the case of the Syr-ian conflict, the person filming the video has a particular political position from which he or she is documenting events. The audience also doesn’t know whether the content has been verified.

In a couple of rare instances, the phrase “unverified pictures” was used, which from an audience point of view seems additionally confusing. It also fails to capture the fact that verification is a process. Journalists and editors often want a piece of content to be proven as 100 percent accurate. In fact, the everyday reality is far messier.

For every piece of content, there are three key verification checks: location, date, and source. It might be possible to be 100 percent sure about the loca-tion from which a photograph was taken, by cross-referencing landmarks on the image with satellite images. And it might be possible to be 99 per-cent certain that a photo was filmed on a specific day through the EXIF data embedded in the image (there is always an element of doubt with EXIF data as internal clocks on cameras can be changed). But it might not be 100 percent clear who uploaded the content. Cross-referencing user-names on social networks might provide a number of clues, but it still may not be possible to find a real name, and certainly not a phone number for contacting someone directly.

Some news organizations—CNN International and Al Jazeera English, for instance—are very good at adding the location to user-generated content and even a date. Overall, however, much of the UGC used (especially from Syria) offered very little information about what the news organization did or did not know about the content and its uploader.


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Conclusions

UGC is being used on a daily basis by the largest 24-hour news channels. However, if asked, their audiences would probably have little idea that this is the case. The numbers show that UGC is rarely labeled and is credited even less frequently.

User-generated content is used when other pictures are not available, as the ongoing reliance on it to cover the Syrian conflict demonstrates. The way that UGC was integrated during coverage of the Glasgow helicopter crash and the razing of Lenin’s statue in Kiev during the Ukrainian protests suggests that UGC is often employed as a stopgap before news agency pic-tures emerge—interestingly, even if the professional ones are less dramatic. This was demonstrated during the coverage of Nelson Mandela’s death. The news organizations had so much material stockpiled from planning for the event that there was no need to seek out UGC. This, even though there were compelling pictures filmed by people on the streets of South Africa documenting the way the country was reacting to Mandela’s death.12

UGC also inspired stories that would otherwise have been ignored, as long as the pictures were compelling enough. Within our sample there were a handful of stories that were driven solely by the UGC that emerged. Some were kicker stories like one about a ship’s cook who was unexpect-edly found alive by a dive team sent to investigate a sunken ship. Others were shocking cases of police brutality captured through secret filming on camera phones.

As far as we could tell, the vast majority of UGC was sourced via the social Web, mostly Twitter or YouTube, as well as some from Facebook. It also seems that much of the UGC used was not sourced directly by the news-


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rooms. These eight news organizations rely on different news agencies for professional content and UGC. All eight channels are subscribers to one or both of the traditional news agencies Reuters and APTN, four of the chan-nels participate in the Eurovision News Exchange, and some are clients of the social media agency Storyful. Only through our qualitative interviews will be able to ascertain whether some of the most widely used pieces of UGC broadcast during our sample were discovered by the newsrooms themselves, or whether they were delivered via the agencies.

Although a great deal of content was sourced from the social Web or via news agencies, some news organizations also received content directly from viewers. CNN International and BBC World have very strong relationships with their audiences in terms of UGC. CNN International has iReport, which is now a very well-established part of its newsgathering operation. Content that has been uploaded directly to iReport was recorded regularly during our sampling period. Similarly, BBC World, via its regular instruc-tions on the rolling bar across the bottom of the screen and at the bottom of online stories, encourages people to send content in to [email protected] or [email protected]. It was startling how much content, used particularly on the BBC Web site, had been sent directly to the news orga-nization via email.

Finally, a surprising finding from this analysis was the absence of viral vid-eos. A viral video, one that reaches over one million views on YouTube in a short period of time, typically involves a talented toddler, a cute animal, or a jaw-dropping sports stunt. In the period sampled, none of these types of videos appeared online or on air.13 With the success of websites such as Buzzfeed and Upworthy, the power of viral videos to drive traffic has been well documented,14 and many online news sites have a viral video section themselves. It was, therefore, surprising that this type of content did not feature in our sample period.


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This first phase of research has provided the foundation for the next, which will involve qualitative interviews with over 60 journalists, editors, and news managers from these eight channels, as well as other newsrooms around the world. In those interviews we will use the data from this report to frame the questions, with a particular emphasis on the reasons for the absence of credits and descriptions of UGC. We will also discuss issues of discovery and verification, and—if anyone will be honest with us—pay-ment. How do newsrooms find UGC and do they undertake their own verification checks or rely on external organizations? How do they deal with ethical considerations, the impact of traumatic UGC pictures, and considerations of taste and decency in terms of what to show audiences? This phase of the research has demonstrated that with the reliance on UGC that exists in most major newsrooms these questions are vital ones. And hopefully their answers will help shape the creation of practical materials to support newsrooms in their daily integration of UGC going forward.


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Endnotes

1 Beckett, C. & Mansell, R., (2008); Hänska-Ahy, M.T. & Shapour, R. (2012); Jönsson, A.M., & Örnebring, H. (2011);, Newman, N. (2009); Paulussen, S. & Ugille, P. (2008); Hermida, A. & Thurman, N. (2008); Wardle, C., Williams, A. & Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2008).

2 medium.com/i-m-h-o/b9e7ae3e512d3 There is some very good research into these networks exploring how some activist groups have

created stronger ties with news organizations outside Syria, for example www.usip.org/sites/default/files/PW91-Syrias%20Socially%20Mediated%20Civil%20War.pdf

4 www.quernstone.com/archives/2010/11/user-generated.html and www.rooreynolds.com/2009/05/07/alternatives-to-ucg/ are two examples of the widely shared opinion that the phrase UGC is unpopular and actually unhelpful.

5 The five days we analyzed were: November 27, 2013; November 30, 2013; December 2, 2013; December 5, 2013; and December 11, 2013. The Web site capture software failed on three of the 40 occasions that are included in this sample. For those days, the previous day was analyzed.

6 Average refers to the mean average.7 The UGC video was actually submitted directly to Guardian Witness, the UGC initiative from the

Guardian newspaper. The video was so dramatic that it was syndicated to a number of different news organizations, including the BBC. It is also worth noting that the video was not described as UGC or credited.

8 Two non-news features on CNN included very high numbers of UGC. These were not included in this table as we wanted to compare stories that appeared on more than one channel. “‘Doctor Who’ turns 50 and fans’ lives will never be the same,” CNN, November 20, 2013, www.edition.cnn.com/2013/11/20/showbiz/doctor-who-irpt-dw50/?hpt=hp_bn8 “North Korea beer tour?,” CNN, November 24, www.edition.cnn.com/video/?/video/international/2013/11/24/nkorea-package-tour.cnn&hpt=hp_bn4&video_referrer=

9 Hänska-Ahy, M.T. & Shapour, R (2012), Harkin (2012) Hermida & Thurman, (2008), Wardle et al., *2008), See also Kevin Anderson’s recent primer on why newsrooms should integrate UGC: www.kbridge.org/clear-editorial-goals-essential-to-effective-ugc-strategies/

10 In journalism, a stringer is a freelance journalist or photographer who contributes reports or photos to a news organization on an ongoing basis but is paid individually for each piece of published or broadcast work (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stringer_(journalism))

11 A dopesheet is metadata that agencies send to accompany a video package to describe the content of the video in written form. It includes a written shotlist, storyline, dates, restrictions on use, and crediting requirements.

12 It is worth noting that there was absolutely no UGC broadcast on television related to Mandela’s death. There was a small amount of UGC included in Web coverage.

13 The only content that could be described in this category was a two-minute roundup showcasing online responses to Miley Cyrus’ appearance at the American Music Awards in front of a giant lip-syncing cat. It showed the audience’s responses, which appeared in tweets, Vine videos, and pictures posted to social networks.

https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/b9e7ae3e512d

http://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/PW91-Syrias%20Socially%20Mediated%20Civil%20War.pdf

http://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/PW91-Syrias%20Socially%20Mediated%20Civil%20War.pdf

http://www.quernstone.com/archives/2010/11/user-generated.html

http://www.rooreynolds.com/2009/05/07/alternatives-to-ucg/


http://www.edition.cnn.com/2013/11/20/showbiz/doctor-who-irpt-dw50/?hpt=hp_bn8

http://www.edition.cnn.com/video/?/video/international/2013/11/24/nkorea-package-tour.cnn&hpt=hp_bn4&video_

http://www.edition.cnn.com/video/?/video/international/2013/11/24/nkorea-package-tour.cnn&hpt=hp_bn4&video_

http://www.kbridge.org/clear-editorial-goals-essential-to-effective-ugc-strategies/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stringer_(journalism)


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14 A nice roundup of recent discussion about this subject appears as part of Neiman Lab’s weekly update here: www.niemanlab.org/2013/12/this-week-in-review-questions-on-journalists-handling-of-nsa-files-and-the-value-of-viral-content/

http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/12/this-week-in-review-questions-on-journalists-handling-of-nsa-files-and-the

http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/12/this-week-in-review-questions-on-journalists-handling-of-nsa-files-and-the


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Hänska-Ahy, M.T. and Shapour, R. “Who’s Reporting the Protests?” Journalism Studies, 13:1, 1–17. (2012.)

Harkin, J., Anderson, K., Morgan, L. and Smith, B. “Deciphering User Generated Content in Transitional Societies: A Syria Coverage Case Study.” Internews Center for Innovation and Learning. (2012.) www.internews.org/sites/default/files/resources/InternewsWPSyria_2012-06-web.pdf.

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Lynch, M, Freelon, D., and Aday, S. “Syria’s Socially Mediated Civil War,” United States Institute of Peace. (January 2014.) www.usip.org/publications/syria-s-socially-mediated-civil-war.

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http://www.usip.org/publications/syria-s-socially-mediated-civil-war

http://www.usip.org/publications/syria-s-socially-mediated-civil-war

http://www.thomsonreuters.com/content/news_ideas/white_papers/media/487784

http://www.thomsonreuters.com/content/news_ideas/white_papers/media/487784

https://www.westminster.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/20021/003WPCC-Vol5-No2-Paulussen_Ugille.pdf





http://www.quernstone.com/archives/2010/11/user-generated.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/knowledgeexchange/cardiffone.pdf

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/knowledgeexchange/cardiffone.pdf

www.towcenter.org

Documents

Amateur Footage: A Global Study of User-Generated Content in TV