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Online Journalism News

BBC News UGC hub goes 24/7

Posted: 12/09/07 By: Oliver Luft
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BBC News is to make its user-generated content hub a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week operation.

The hub is responsible for authenticating, soliciting, gathering and distributing UGC across the corporation's news outlets.

The BBC is currently interviewing candidates so it can expand the UGC team to 13, from its present nine staff, allowing the development of an overnight team to cover debates and news across the globe.

The hub, which expects to go 24/7 from late October, is expanding its activity as part of the broader growth of the BBC News interactivity department, as it too takes on extra staff.

"Interactivity, the feedback we get from the audience, is across everything we do now at BBC News," Vicky Taylor, editor of Interactivity at BBC News, told Journalism.co.uk.

"Whatever the story is, wherever in the world it is, people want to be involved in some way by commenting or helping us tell the story; if they are directly involved, as an eye witness, if it may have some resonance for them or they have experience of it, and all this feeds back into what we do.

"I keep using the phrase 'it's more authentic', in the past in journalism we would have gone through the traditional roots: charities, organisations, to find case studies.

"Now, in a very short space of time, we are going to get people who are directly involved without going through intermediary of third parties. It's straight to the broadcaster, and in huge numbers."

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