stefan

Over the last few months, we have been working intensively with media companies on concepts for integrating user-generated content. What most media companies do today is to have their own staff and their own journalists blogging. I often wonder what the objective of this concept might be. My guess is that the motivation sometimes is more a sentiment of "we should at least do something".

Here are some of the reasons against the concept of "blogging journalists":

• Journalists are blogging during their working hours. Therefore, the costs for blogging are as high as all other content production.
• Often the content is more or less the same as in the traditional publication, only in a new format
• What makes blogs interesting is rather niche content than mainstream content. But the cost of production for niche content should be appropriate for its reach
• The personalized content approach aiming to establish a journalist/reader relation often fails as journalists do not mingle with other bloggers as they barley comment on other blogs or sometimes do not even publish a blogroll to avoid outbound links.

All of this leads me to believe that the strategy for media companies has to be to benefit from user-generated content. It has the potential to tighten relationships with readers and users are able to produce and add content that cannot be covered at reasonable costs by the media brand itself.