The digital rights boot on the other foot
Heres a great article about the use of UGC content by the big media companies. Especially when you consider all the stories about legal wrangles initiated by big media owners towards people allegedly using and distributing their content/media/music/video illegally (without the proper rights). The point is this article gets you thinking that maybe the boot is moving to the other foot, and perhaps as UGC becomes more common-place-everyday-bahaviour perhaps it will be the individuals attacking the big boys for the exact same behaviour. Read on…
Should citizen journalists be better rewarded , by Graham Holliday
The sight of old media freely milking the udders of UGC - “user generated content” - is now a common and seemingly unstoppable trend. News organisations want our pictures, our videos and our words.
The latest attempt at opening the gates of mainstream media to us citizen oiks and our cameraphones finds Yahoo! and Reuters joining forces to bring us their new - get down with the kids - news service, the appallingly titled You Witness News.
The idea is simple; those cuddly citizen journalists will file their right place at the right time snaps, their newsworthy videos and their sneak peaks of the great up to no good, to the You Witness News website.
From there, according to Journalism.co.uk,
“The best Reuters will edit and distribute to third party publications and run on its own website.
Yahoo News will run images submitted by the public as part of its news mix, along with images supplied by the major news agencies and broadcasters.”
The BBC, not to be out-clicked, are in on the act too. They recently announced Your News. The seemingly self-explanatory name is a pilot TV
channel created entirely from UGC and edited “by BBC professionals”.
Sky News does something similar. The Daily Telegraph, along with most other UK newspapers, requests readers to send in their snaps. We’re not talking flea pit bedroom outfits run by spotty teenagers here.
It’s mainstream, big bucks media and they very clearly want to get their hands on our media, but why exactly is big boy media so interested in our self-generated content?
Of course, the end game’s not about content at all, it’s about cash. Or, in the case of the users generating the content it’s about… err… no cash.
The New York Times has more from Chris Ahearn, the president of the Reuters media group.
“Users will not be paid for images displayed on the Yahoo and Reuters sites. But people whose photos or videos are selected for distribution to Reuters clients will receive a payment.”
Ahearn said the company had not yet figured out how to structure those payments. The basic payment may be relatively small, but he said Reuters was likely to pay more to people offering exclusive rights to images of major events.
For now, no money is changing hands between Yahoo and Reuters, but if Reuters is able to create a separate news service with the user-created material, it will split the revenue with Yahoo.
The thinking about the online world has long been that the money will eventually follow the eyeballs. There’ll be a tipping point, so the thinking goes, when the advertising loot will, one glorious morning, migrate in sum to the online world, deadwood publications will finally be snuffed out of their misery through this mass migration to digital dough.
In recent weeks and months we’ve learned about the launches and partnerships of Yahoo!/Reuters, Your News, Google/YouTube, Reuters/Pluck, yet not one of them has published a revenue model for the creators of the content they are so darned keen to get their mitts on.
Yes, we social web users love to share. Yes, we’re going to create and publish this stuff regardless of old media, not because of it. But, no, we don’t want to see old media profit from ‘our stuff’.
For the past 10 years British freelance journalism pay rates have remained more or less static. Will You Witness News apply even these stagnated freelance rates to the work of the crowd who would produce photos and videos anyway regardless of payment?
As it stands the citizen journalists, networked journalists or, as I prefer to call them, people, will garner little more than a hearty slap on the back from their big pals in old media as they watch their creations wheeled out to the world, no doubt surrounded by advertising and cash generating hyperlinks.
If it’s good enough for a hugely profitable company such as Reuters to use, then it’s good enough for Reuters to pay a Reuters rate to the person creating that content.
It’s all well and good old media bumbling into our media world, but don’t come cherry picking without being prepared to cough up the readies. Throw crumbs and you’ll find them spat back at you. And whatever you do, be straight up with us. If you have no intention of paying us, say so now. Procrastination only breeds suspicion.
If you want to get hip with the kids, link out by all means. Like everybody else. But don’t use us and abuse us, pay us peanuts, or worse, pay us nowt.
That way is not only unethical, but will lead you to links from hell, which so often in the online world leads to death or at least to a rather unpleasant and very public rogering.
OA is here