Beyond user-generated content: a production study examining the ways in which UGC is used at the BBC

This article provides a case study of the BBC, and the attitudes of its news workers towards audience material, or, as it is more commonly referred to, usergenerated content (UGC). Research has been carried out about the adoption of participatory and interactive elements in online newsrooms (Boczkowski, 2004a, 2004b; Örnebring, 2008; Thurman, 2008), but this is one of the first articles to examine a major broadcast organization. Before the London bombings on 7 July 2005, BBC News Interactive in London received around 300 emails on an average day. This has now risen to around 12,000, with spikes around certain popular stories. This transformation has been reflected in the establishment of a dedicated newsroom, the UGC Hub, responsible for centrally managing material sent in by the public. From a very low base around three years ago, the hub now receives around 1000 stills and video clips in a quiet week, and during the floods in June 2006 they received around 7000 photos and videos in five days. These are just approximate figures for the information and raw material flowing into the BBC’s growing UGC Hub; they do not include the content sent directly to individual programmes, or to the many local and regional newsrooms across the UK, which can be considerable, especially during big ‘UGC stories’, such as a terrorist attack or extreme weather. We propose that the term ‘audience material’ should be used instead of UGC, because the latter fails to capture adequately the range of phenomena