The citizen content revolution

From the Arab Spring to the Boston bombings – user-generated content (UGC) has become the new norm on screen, online and in print.

The footage is often shaky, the images blurred – pros might turn up their noses – but more and more stories are being broken by citizens in the heat of the action.

UGC has come a long way from letters to the editor and now the power to create news content has turned anyone with a smartphone into a potential journalist. And audiences are increasingly aware of their own changing role.

Citizen-powered news is forcing mainstream media to adapt and now a new generation of intermediaries is here to help – sourcing content, verifying it – even training amateurs in the needs of the newsroom.

Nikki Usher from George Washington University says: “More and more people have mobile phones, more and more people have instant access to the recording of instant history in a way and a scale that has never before, before been seen, so that makes everybody a potential journalist, or at least everybody potentially able to commit what we might call an act of journalism.”

Listening Post’s Will Yong takes a look now at the citizen content revolution and how UGC specialists are giving everyone the opportunity to commit individual acts of journalism and even get paid in the process.

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