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It's time for media publishers to take control of user-generated content (UGC), Matthew Buckland, general manager of media24.com, South Africa's largest online publisher, told this year's WAN World Digital Publishing Conference.

"Media should relish being control freaks about their content. That's what they do," Buckland said yesterday at the Digital Revenue Goldmine event in Amsterdam.

While publishers allow comments under articles, they have not gone far enough in using the best of user-generated content (UGC) online, he said.

But rather than completely opening up sites to UGC, Buckland said it is time to rein in UGC and combine 'the best of the blogging and the best of the media world'.

Speaking about his work as general manager of South Africa's Mail&Guardian Online (M&G), Buckland said the paper's reader blogging platform Thought Leader had made use of nine million words of content with 'an editorial budget of zero turning traditional media on its head'.

But, he added, such submissions needed 'editorial control' with 'careful vetting' by an editor.

<#advert specific="3"#>Rubbishing claims that citizen media led to situations like a fall in Apple's share price after false rumours of CEO Steve Jobs' ill health, he said the responsibility was with CNN, which ran the report on its citizen journalism site iReport. Publishers using UGC should not abandon the idea of 'gatekeeping' and act more responsibly in this role.

"I think newspapers have the right not to publish comments. The approach we took at M&G was if we thought the comment was stupid we didn't publish. It has got to contribute to the debate."

"We're an editorial product – that's the role that we play. I went through a period of confusion where I was sucked in and it was all about the user-created content," he added.

But now, he said, it is time to embrace UGC in a controlled manner.

The full audio of Buckland's chat with Journalism.co.uk, in which he also talks about mobile revenue in the South African context, can be listened to here:



Buckland's comments were supported by Eric Scherer, director of strategic planning and partnerships at Agence France-Press (AFP).

"Checking is everything. We don't want to make the same mistake [as CNN's error over Steve Jobs' health]. So we will not put the pipe from UGC to our content. We will never do that. Of course, we welcome contributions, but we will have a clear process to check it," he told Journalism.co.uk.

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