A new generation of story tipsters

I once lived in a lively village in the rural Home Counties. During my time there, the villagers witnessed countless road crashes, some of them fatal; tales of woodland witchcraft; unruly youths; a drive-by shooting and an armed raid on the post office. A brothel came and went – as did the travellers. There was a smattering of celebrities who lived there, and played a role in village life, and there were some inspirational success stories too.

But when I picked up the local weekly paper, I would read Doris Forest’s very different account of the neighbourhood. "How lovely it is to live here now that the daffodils are blooming …" or "Last month, 25 excited girls from the Guides attended a performance of the Mikado in the village hall."

And therein lies the main problem with contributed content … the vast majority of it is, to put it politely, not very interesting.

And the blame for that lies squarely on the shoulders of the newspapers who publish it. We do not train these amateur scribes in what makes a good story, how to construct it, the difference between fact and comment or even a basic understanding of media law. As a result, their work is largely a collection of boring and longwinded pars that fail to capture the heartbeat of the community.

It is often little more than a recycled list of "what’s on" items from the parish magazine.

Recently we have given fancy titles to these amateur hacks. They have become Citizen Journalists, a term which erroneously builds a picture of respectable and genteel semi-professionals championing Press freedom out of principle.

And what they send us is UGC. This is not Unsolicited Gobbledygook Claptrap, as you might suspect, but User Generated Content.

But all that has really changed, apart from the bureaucratic names, is that the widespread use of mobile phones with cameras and the massive take-up in broadband, means everyone can now play. The whole village can become Doris Forest.

The content has not got any better of course (witness the self-indulgent blogs that litter the web), but there is potentially much more of it. And the law of percentages, quite rightly, states that the more sand you sieve the better your chances of uncovering the gold dust.

This is one of the essential problems in soliciting UGC. Instead of going out and finding stories, the professional journalists find themselves spending their time monitoring and authenticating the work of the amateur.

At the BBC, there are some 20 journalists working on the UGC hub, validating stories and chasing tip offs. It undoubtedly pays dividends. The Beeb has broadcast lead bulletins, eyewitness accounts, videos of breaking news events and, as we all remember, the mobile phone images of July 7th.

At the Sun and the News of the World it works too. The papers urge their readers to ring or text 63000 and "get cash for their stories". They are inundated with raw material – and have a team that has to wade through the 97% dross to get to the good bits.

The good bits – a quality selection of picture leads for the paper and video clips for the website – make it a worthwhile investment.

But can regional newspapers, who have neither the Sun’s budget to pay for stories nor a spare 20 journalists to authenticate them, capitalise effectively on UGC?

The principle of recruiting the whole community as your eyes and ears is undoubtedly a sound one. Giving as many people as possible a voice should also be part of every editor’s vision. But the practicalities of opening your columns to all and sundry need to be managed carefully. So, here are my ten tips on how to get the most out of your burgeoning and eager band of Citizen Journalists.

1. Train the correspondents
One-day in the office explaining what makes news … and what doesn’t; how to write an intro; structure and brevity; copy deadlines; the difference between fact and comment and a basic understanding of law, will pay enormous dividends. It will save time in the editing process, make the content more interesting and stimulate your stringers.

2. Make it easy
Tell the readers exactly want you want … and what you don’t want. Do you want weddings, success stories, photographs, tip-offs, real life tales, video clips, features, comments, boring blogs, what’s on info? If not – tell them not to send them. If so, encourage them. Put panels in the paper, and on the website, telling them exactly what you want and how to send it.

3. The power of mobile
The UK penetration of mobile phones last year was 108% … and we send more than 100 million text messages every day. Everyone has one… and many of them take video and photographs. The Sun produced a supplement on its 63000 number and regularly runs teaser panels on its news pages.

It recognises that people are used to communicating via mobiles. Get yourself an easy to remember number and put it everywhere and check it regularly.

4. Pay tribute
When someone dies in your patch, open the book of condolences / tributes and let people pay their respects via your website. The family can moderate it, so you don’t have to divert a huge amount of journalistic time to it. When two youngsters died in a car crash, the Evening News in Norwich ran all of the texts that the victim’s friends and family sent. The result was a very emotional read that brought a generation, who would not normally read the paper, into the fold. You can do the same for weddings and births.

5. Recruit a review crew
Who does your music, theatre, film and restaurant reviews? You may have someone who really has their finger on the pulse, but more likely it is some hack who has cornered the freebie market in the office. No wonder our papers have little credibility with younger readers when the archetypal ageing Oasis fan chooses only to review the CDs he likes and regularly slags off Kate Nash, the Guillemots and anything that sounds remotely like rap. On iTunes, I can read the recommendations of others who enjoy similar music to me; on Trip Advisor I can check out the detailed views of other visitors before I choose my holiday resort and hotel. Your website can build a reputation as being the place to find out what a film or restaurant is really like. "Want to hear what our readers think about The Kingdom? There are 50 reviews on our website ... why not add your own?" Newsday, in New York, has a Review Crew page – readers giving a daily dose of opinions on everything from TV programmes to film premieres. Time Out even hands the editorship of particular issues over to guests such as Nick Hornby. Something the local paper could adapt?

6. A community in conversation with itself
The phrase above is the slogan of Bluffton Today. The South Carolina newspaper’s website is a triumph. Everyone has a free blog, everyone can post a picture. Having a birthday party? Send all your photos. Got a video of the dog show? Send it in. They have a "We spotted" gallery of professional pictures and a "You spotted" gallery by the readers. If someone is on the road and there is a crash, the first instinct is to text it on to the forum. The second is to ring the emergency services.

7. Be a sporting champion
For the last 12 years, I have run a local youth football team. Not that many years ago my young players would turn up to the weekend games clutching the cutting of the league table from the Hastings Observer. Now they come to training with a print out from the FA’s full-time website. The kids want the results and league tables early … and if you can provide pictures, top scorer tables etc all the better. Club secretaries, like myself, are enthusiasts who will supply everything for free. There are parents at every game, taking photos and video. The Daily Echo in Southampton has stolen back the initiative … hosting the Eastleigh and District Mini Soccer League’s website and placing itself at the heart of the junior footballing community. Take a look at www.dailyecho.co.uk/sport/eastleighdistrictminisoccerleague. Shouldn’t every local paper be doing this? The potential is endless.

8. Set the agenda
Galvanise your readers. Ask them what they think of the burning issue of the day; encourage the debate; get them to provide the evidence and the comment. It can all add red meat to your coverage. It doesn’t all have to be dry stuff either. When a survey said that people from the North East had the worst sense of humour in the country, the Northern Echo was outraged. It asked its readers to send in their favourite joke on video and then placed them on the website. The results on www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/audiovideo/jokes/ are worth ten minutes of anybody’s time.

9. Polls, opinions, questions
It is now easier than ever to solicit opinions from the readers; to run our own snap (if unscientific) polls; to ask what questions we should put to our politicians, football managers and business leaders. We can turn readers into our researchers … and give them a more pertinent voice.

10. Is there a story there?
The volume of emails or texts on a particular subject and the number of hits on an item or video on our website can serve as an indicator of the interest there is on certain stories. It can be a very effective copytasting guide, making us move stories up and down the news agenda. Ignore what your people are telling you at your peril.

Media companies tapping into the expertise of others, harnessing the enthusiasm and knowledge that is out there, is an essential part of modern day journalism. There is always someone in our audience who knows more about a story than we do.

And adding comment, opinion, anecdotes, photographs and video from those who live and breathe the community every day can only add to the richness of our titles.

But taking the content en masse and dropping it wholesale on to your website or into your columns will only accelerate our decline. As Scott Clarke of the Houston Chronicle said at the recent Network Journalism Summit in New York: "I want my reporters to be the conductors of an orchestra of citizen journalists."

We need to apply the same journalistic standards to checking and producing UGC as we do to any other content. And somewhere along the line, we need to protect the professional journalists, the investigators and great writers from becoming merely the processors of the work of amateurs.