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Using an evaluation framework, this study sheds light on the organizational factors that influence the use of user-generated content (UGC) in radio newsrooms. Although communication research is consistently emphasizing rapid changes in technology and the need for journalists to adapt to their multi-platform environments, this study shows that some radio journalists and managers, at least, are still quite conservative in their innovative practices. Through the use of semi-structured interviews with radio managers and journalists in a major Canadian market, five main uses of UGC were identified in the newsroom. These factors were directly related to the perceived notion of the audience and its value to news reporting. Financial pressures, company policy and professional standards are the three main organizational factors that influence these uses and the extent to which the practices were observed. Age, language and sectorial differences did not appear to be influential in this study. These results, however, suggest that work still needs to be done to establish which factors are most relevant in overcoming fears and challenges with respect to innovative UGC use. A better knowledge of the audience could also influence future behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the results from a content analysis of four Swedish online citizen journalism outlets are presented and discussed. The analysis focuses on new digital venues for news-making in theory and the question of the political relevance of citizen journalism in reality. This broad question is operationalized by asking more specifically how citizen journalists tell the news, according to established distinctions between variations in topic dimensions, focus, and presentational style. Our results show that citizen journalists tend to tell soft news. They rarely report on policy issues, local authorities, or people affected by decisions being made by them. Furthermore, the news focuses on individual relevance and is mostly episodic in nature. The style of writing is predominantly impersonal and unemotional. In sum, our results suggest that citizen journalism in Sweden is not yet at a stage where it can be considered a plausible alternative to traditional journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary considers citizen journalism emerging from the Syrian Civil War and argues that its usefulness is dependent on an “interpreter tier” of user-generated media analysts. In contrast to discourse celebrating more direct forms of citizen journalism, the piece emphasizes the importance of intermediary layers of meaning-making as the means by which complex fields of amateur information can be made intelligible. This “interpreter tier,” although often ignored in popular and scholarly discourse, takes on an increasingly important function as mainstream sources must increasingly rely on citizen materials produced in far off places. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The objective of this study was to investigate the use of tags in iReport to detect breaking news in terms of coverage and immediacy. Coverage refers to the extent to which news reported in mainstream media can also be detected in iReport, while immediacy refers to the promptness of news reported in mainstream media vis-à-vis those detected in iReport. A total of 10 ground truth events were identified from mainstream media between 1 April 2008 and 31 December 2008. Additionally, 481,455 tags from 118,545 postings were drawn from iReport in the same period. Relative frequencies of the top 200 most frequently-used tags were analysed to check for spikes and bursts. Based on the results, four main findings emerged. First, the performance of using spikes and bursts to detect news events was found to be comparable. Next, news events detected via spikes and bursts were found to lag ranging from a few days to more than a week compared to the dates reported by mainstream media. Third, news events deemed to be significant by professional journalists did not always attract a high level of interest from iReport contributors. Finally, even though citizen journalism transcends national boundaries via the internet, news posted to iReport seemed to show a proclivity towards local context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]