A few days ago at work I got an email from a student doing a dissertation about the BBC. On her course, the lecturers always talked about the BBC being a model upon which news and media organisations around the world have tried to mould their own services. No, I’m not intending to wax lyrical about how great the BBC is but I did want to point you towards the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines for Online Services.
I think the BBC’s openness about it’s editorial policies IS something special, perhaps unique, and that it should be copied (the openness, not necessarily the guidelines) by other news and media organisations.
As we encourage our audiences to send us ever more stuff, we’re going to be making more and more, editorial decisions about that content and those decisions are going to affect them. So let’s be clear about what we want people to send us, how they’re going to be treated as user contributors, how we might use their stuff, and what the proces will be at our end. Editorial transparency in the way we collect and manage user contributions builds trust with our audience. Explaining exactly what we’re looking for and what we’ll use might also reduce the number of people wasting our time, and theirs, sending us photos of their cat playing in the snow when all we want (for example) is photos from the Bristol Baloon festival.