Citizenside blog

These days more and more news outlets are beginning to experiment with the notion of collaborative journalism.

Publications and TV and Radio stations are opening up their traditionally closed newsrooms to content produced by loyal audience members, because the simple fact is, professional journalists can't be everywhere all the time. By taking advantage of the loyalty of their readers, these intrepid news outlets who engage in "social news-gathering" are able to get wider, deeper, and richer content.

Recently, a number of high profile media houses in France used the opportunity of an uncharacteristically early snow fall to engage their audiences and collect thousands of their photos and videos. Let's have a look at some examples.

RTL
Since calling for photos on November 29, RTL has received about 60 series of images contributed by their listeners. Remember, this is a radio station, not a traditionally visual audience, and still they have collected a superb gallery of images. RTL has created a portfolio of these images on their community website, so visitors can easily browse all the breathtaking slideshows.


When visiting BFM TV's community homepage, the first thing I noticed was the incredible amount of video content there. The news network's viewers certainly prefer to send in video it seems, most likely because they contribute for a chance to get aired on national television and assume that video format fits best with the what the TV station is looking for. Have a look for yourself.


Metro France
Metro readers from all over France have been flooding the Metro Reporter website with stunning snow photos, the best of which have been grouped into a slideshow and published on the homepage of Metro France. By posting the photos here and linking to the community site, Metro raises awareness of their program to buy and publish readers photos called Metro Reporter. It also helps to communicate to readers exactly what quality of content Metro is looking for, which raises the overall quality level of reader contributions (because readers know their best chance to get published is with those types of photos).

On the website YOU, Le Parisien's devoted community space for readers to interact with the brand and other readers like them, the national paper has launched a call for witnesses, asking for snow-related contributions. This great tool embeds on the homepage, calling readers to contribute their text, photos, and videos, and it also displays a collection of the last 4 articles contributed on the subject. The call is complemented with a similar embed on the main Le Parisien.fr website, and as a result, they have received some real postcard-quality shots (like the Champs-Élysées photo at the top)

20Minutes
Because 20Minutes is a national newspaper with multiple regional editions, it helps them to organize their content accordingly. That's why you'll see a nice map with all reader contributions that helps visitors to make better sense of what they're looking at. Visitors can also scroll down to see a larger interactive map with all the other contributions in the immediate area, and can zoom in our out to their desired level of detail. In this way, 20Minutes is able to offer readers both a national overview and a hyperlocal experience, all using crowdsourced content.




The amount of technical work required to execute crowd-sourcing, audience engaging programs like those shared above is actually a lot less strenuous and time consuming than one might expect. In fact, all of the above uses of UGC were accomplished by regular editors with no complicated software wizardry required. All above-mentioned media houses are clients of Citizenside, and use its plug-and-play solution, the Reporter Kit, as both the backbone and facade of their UGC hubs.

And the truly amazing thing is that this flood of content, this creation of hundreds of new pages with thousands of attention-grabbing images, was all eagerly contributed by loyal audience members. Meaning, no professional camera crews needed to be dispatched to various corners of the country at the companies' expenses. Instead these media houses were wise and forward-thinking enough to recognize the power of their audiences as an incredible source of complementary content for their traditional reporting.

By engaging with their audiences, these news outlets are driving engagement themselves, increasing reader loyalty, and multiplying entry points to their sites at the same time. Not only does this improve the audience experience with richer editorial content, it contributes to the bottom line as well through the increased advertising opportunities.