User-generated content, also known as UGC, is a large umbrella category covering content that is created and shared online by users of digital platforms, including social media websites and news websites.
User-generated content can include text, photos, videos, audio files, memes, and other types of content. For example, many of today’s most popular service-oriented websites are based in whole or in part on user-generated content. This includes Yelp, which revolves around citizen reviews of businesses, and Rotten Tomatoes, which features movie ratings from average citizens alongside the reviews and scores of professional film critics. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter could not exist without user-generated content. And, although user-generated content is common across all digital domains, it plays a unique role in the context of online journalism. Journalists use user-generated content to complement, augment, inform, and even provide the basis for their own journalism, while audiences use it to make their own voices heard and to engage with the process of reporting and sharing information.
To illustrate the evolution of user-generated content, consider letters to the editor. Before the internet, such letters were the most common means for news consumers to get in touch with news producers. People wrote letters to the editor reflecting on the news, sharing their own stories, complaining about specific types or topics of coverage, asking questions for clarification, and sharing news tips with journalists. Some of those letters would then go on to appear in print, in the editorial and opinion sections of news publications, thereby making them an early form of user-generated content. However, those letters were limited both to text as a medium, to the will of the writer to create them, and to the will and ability of the publisher to publish them. (After all, space limitations meant that only a tiny fraction of letters were ever published.)
Today, by contrast, news websites, apps, and social media pages regularly solicit and share user-generated content alongside journalist-generated news. News slideshows feature fan-taken photos from a city’s most recent football game, while journalistic outlets' Facebook accounts ask readers for their worst weather-related disaster stories. Comments sections at the bottom of articles invite readers to share their thoughts about (or responses to) news, and hashtags allow Twitter and Instagram users to connect their own stories and images to coverage of a topic appearing on news websites through different widgets on the page. Some news websites even allow community members to upload events to be included in the outlet’s online calendar page. News outlets have, in this way, become platforms for user engagement and interaction with the news, in addition to destinations for consuming the news.
Research suggests that creators of user-generated content may become more active and loyal members of the online communities they contribute to. They also may become more engaged with the sites they contribute to and increase their interactions with other users on those sites. For journalism, the engagement and loyalty that user-generated content can help to generate has positive financial outcomes as well.
Like the practice of participatory journalism, user-generated content can give news audiences a voice in the coverage and dissemination of information, and engage them with the news and the process of reporting it. And, like participatory journalism, user-generated content also has the potential to blur the traditional boundaries of newsgathering by introducing the work of non-professional actors who don’t belong to the institution of U.S. journalism and aren’t trained in the same professional norms and ethical standards.
As another complication, when incorporated by journalists into their work and their websites, user-generated content is held to some of the standards of traditional journalism while excused from others. For example, user-generated photos or embedded social media posts are usually clearly distinguished as such by attributions that make clear the author of the work. But at the same time, user-generated comments below articles feature first-person opinions and stories, many of which are much more overtly biased than journalistic standards allow professional journalists to be in their own work. (And, some of which include deeply unprofessional elements, such as insults or curse words.) When journalists quote or excerpt user-generated content in their work—for example, through a Tweet they decide to embed in a news story—they must first verify that the information it provides is accurate, just as they would with any other element of that story. This includes verifying the accuracy of user-generated photos and videos, as well as text. As we all know, just because something appears in our social media feeds does not mean it is true. The same goes for user-generated content.
User-generated content is created and shared online by users of digital platforms, including social media websites and news websites. It can include text, photos, videos, audio files, memes, and other types of content.
News outlets have become platforms for user engagement and interaction with the news, in addition to destinations for consuming the news.
Creators of user-generated content may become more active members of the online communities they contribute to and more engaged with those sites.
When incorporated by journalists into their work and their websites, user-generated content is held to some standards of traditional journalism while being excused from others.