oh my newsnight – Cybersoc

The BBC’s long running Newsnight, a TV current affairs programme that most people in the UK will be familiar with, is asking viewers to submit their own news and current affairs videos for inclusion in the programme early in 2007. They’re calling it Oh My Newsnight which, Newsnight’s editor Peter Barron admits on the programme’s blog, is a tip of the hat to the Korean website of a similar name that was an early example of the, now increasingly ubiquitous, “citizen journalism” news portal.

So what? Well, yeh, you could say that. Asking members of the audience to submit their content, what the news and media industry refers to as “user generated content” and I what I usually just call “stuff” here, isn’t new. But look what they have to say about the method of submission for that stuff:

“Once you have made your film post it to a video hosting website – such as Google Video, YouTube, blip.tv or Putfile.com – then send us the link using the form below and we’ll take a look…”

I’m not the only one who thinks it’s a great idea to ask people to share their stuff, online of course, and THEN send the BBC a link to it is a great idea. Why?

Everyone who is inspired to create content gets to post and share it online – regardless of what the BBC thinks of it

Newsnight’s editorial decisions regarding their content selections will be open to scrutiny since everything submitted will be out their and viewable

There are already large audiences using tools like YouTube, blip.tv, etc who are thirsty for this type of content

People who view this content might follow a link back to the programme, or be inspired to create their own content and post it online (eg. potential to create new audiences and audience contributors)

It means that no one at the BBC has to sift through hundreds of emails containing large, system clogging files of various formats but, instead, the programme makers can go out and look at the stuff on someone else’s platform

The user experience is largely the responsibility of others and, lets face it, because that experience is their core business they’ll do a good job of ensuring it’s easy to register, post content, etc

Speaking of platforms, this format of soliciting content submissions cuts out the requirement for the BBC to provide any sort of platform for the ingestion and/our playout of that content online

Oh My Newsnight has taken a bit of flak though too, with several people posting comments on the blog suggesting that this was just another attempt to replace quality journalism with home videos. Editor Peter Barron went out into the comments and got his hands dirty to respond:

“We’re not doing this as a cheap way to fill airtime. Our commitment to high quality, professional film-making is as strong as ever. We’re doing it as an experiment, to see if views or journalism bubbling up from our viewers could provide good TV…”

Despite it’s name, oh my newsnight is using some interesting and groundbreaking – at least for a major mainstream news and media organisation – ideas to encourage it’s audience to create and share stuff online with the very best bits getting shown on BBC2 TV. All without the technical, editorial, user management and legal issues that would have arisen had they tried to do this the old way of waving their big email address around and sifting through the flood looking for the few gems at the bottom of the pile.

One Comment

14th November 2006
Ryan Morrison

I posted about this when I first came across the brilliant paxman video last week and you’re right – it’s a great move forward for the BBC.
I’m not going to go into why it’s a great idea as you’ve already done that and so have I (http://www.upyourego.com/blog/?p=224) but I just wanted to say I love the idea of “Geek Week 2.0” in January :)
Also have you seen the video the Shropshire team made for The Friday Night Gerbil and posted to YouTube in reply to Oh My Newsnight called Re: Oh No Newsnight??
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3H62PFQryQM&mode=related&search=

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