Councillors, police chiefs and other ‘approved’ people are being allowed to upload pieces straight to some newspaper websites without being moderated first, it has emerged.
Local World weeklies the Essex Chronicle and Tamworth Herald have both published articles in the past week calling for readers to join the team and start writing and taking photos for them, “cutting out the middle man” by allowing them to upload directly online.
It is part of a drive by bosses to encourage the community to ‘join in’ with producing their local paper, including giving certain people permission to make their copy live without the need for a reporter or editor to read it first.
Andy Phelan, head of content for Local World’s transformation team, told HTFP that pre-vetted contributors such as councillors, policemen and teachers who have agreed to write blogs for the paper would be allowed to upload stories which would be published immediately, while others will go into a queue to be checked by moderators before going live.
Said Andy: “It is about creating a community, encouraging our readers to share their news and views, for us to be at the centre of all that.
“It’s not a one-way street anymore, social media means anyone can publish anything, anywhere at anytime. This just reflects that.
“The role of journalists and journalism doesn’t fundamentally change, they will still highlight the important things that they believe others should see but the community now has the chance and is encouraged to join in.”
The Tamworth Herald is offering an iPad Mini for the year's best 'citizen journalist'
In an editorial piece, the Herald urges people to be their “eyes and ears” on the streets, admitting that it “can’t be everywhere at once.”
The paper is offering an iPad Mini to tempt new contributors in, with the prize going to the best story at the end of the year.
In his paper’s piece, Essex Chronicle editor Paul Dent-Jones said it would mean people no longer had to wait a week to share their news
“We want our readers, both online and in print, to be the best informed in the county,” he said.
“By allowing our readership to share news with each other directly on our website and by cutting out the middle man, we hope to make our website a community portal for everything happening locally.”
The best stories from the online contributors will feature in the print edition, he added.
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Wow – what an innovation. That’s the coffin lid sealed.
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And here is the story from the Tamworth Herald. http://www.thisistamworth.co.uk/Help-Herald-report-news-win-iPad-mini/story-18586660-detail/story.html#axzz2PrKGdLjX
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Not good.
It’s like a hospital giving patients the “opportunity to join in” by removing their own tonsils thus cutting out the middle man.
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This isn’t newsworthy at all. Newspapers, including mine, have been running their UGC platforms like this for years. We’ve had approved people from charities, community groups, sports clubs etc uploading their own content to the web for a long time. If anything, this move by Local World is way behind the times.
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Great idea. Why not just get rid of journalists altogether?!
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That smacking sound, my friends, is the lips of numerous PR officers across the country with their fingers poised over their keyboards. The future’s digital……..#Pravdaonaplate
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This is almost as sensible as asking an obnoxious Kent teenager to be a youth police commissioner!
Given the rubbish that the press offices of Kent County Council, Thanet District Council, and Kent Police put out – and some of the defamatory and criminal content on some councillors’ blogs – Local World are asking for trouble. And your readers will be bored to tears.
Silly, ill-considered gimmick. Must try harder.
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Publishers like Local World makes their money from having an audience that they can sell to advertisers. If UGC helps them keep / grow their audience, it seems to me a pretty sensible move. I very much doubt they see UGC as replacing content generated by journalists.
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This industry AND country is going to the dogs!
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@Dunkin Donuttin
Oi! I work in PR, and I’d much rather pass my stuff to a reporter who can report stuff properly than some councillor who’d want to somehow get involved and make it all about them!
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It was allowing lots of unchecked copy to be uploaded straight to the web that recently led to an awful lot of people being threatened, rightly as it turned out, with libel suits by Lord McAlpine.
Have the legal team on standby…
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Because politicians and policemen never lie or exaggerate. Oh no.
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Fair play to your Former Hack, if that is the way you conduct matters. But I fear you may well be in the minority if my current experience of the ever burgeoning PR operations of councils, health trusts, politicians and now crime commissioners is anything to go by. They truly will be salivating at the prospect of piggybacking on all the effort which Local World is investing to promote the brand of its websites to gain wider audience. And without professional journalistic standards applied to these channels it won’t be long before that self-same audience fails to differentiate between comment and conjecture or verified fact. And where does that leave us? Perhaps Mr Phelan could tell us….
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What a terrifying dystopia. And what makes someone an ‘approved’ person? Councillors are by definition biased to their parties and can be unreliable and wrong, on purpose or otherwise. Does this also work both ways and the public can rant at council and police meetings without prior approval/request to ask a question in order to ‘cut out the middle man’? Er, no.
And while we’re at it, journalists are more than ‘middle men’.
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Oh come on, they weren’t going to wait for nearly a year for this beautiful April Fool!
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Some of the copy we receive from our local police press office is riddled with not only spelling and grammatical errors, but horrendous legal bloopers. Same goes for a lot of councillors’ blogs and press releases. The idea of letting them upload content directly to our website would fill me with horror.
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What a disaster…next stop total oblivion!
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Why not? Hard copy pages are already crammed with submitted copy that has obviously been plonked in a ‘shape’ with little care about the content or accuracy.
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The odd one or two PR teams will think that this is great, but then it’ll dawn on them: ‘Why are we publishing content on channels we have no control over?’. If they’re going the share this link on FB, Twitter etc, why would they drive that hard work to a Local World site rather than content on their own customers’ sites? From an SEO point of view, they’ll be driving stronger links to Local World at the expense of their clients’ sites.
As for local authorities, police etc, why would they go to the effort of creating a press release and then have to create it all over again on a LW site? They’d rather just send it to everyone and let them deal with publishing it. They may do it once or twice as a novelty, but it’ll soon wane as time constraints etc take over.
Finally, bloggers. There may be a few who want the additional exposure but, for the most part, they’ll want to be paid for their content.
All I see happening here is it ending up being used as a mouthpiece for a handful of the usual ‘local champions’ and a few student bloggers hoping to get a job out of it.
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Great. Papers full of coffee mornings, pointless drivel from councilers and ‘stories’ about nothing in particular. I can’t wait.
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