One of the phrases tossed around newsrooms a lot these days is “user-provided content.” It’s all the stuff that readers and clickers send us—recipes, requests for recipes, calendar items, business milestones, photographs etc. Newspapers love them. Two reasons. First, they’re free. We don’t pay somebody to write us two paragraphs on Jimmy getting his Eagle Scout award. Second, they appeal to this idea of community, that is to say, by publishing these items, we’re connecting with our readers and making them part of the process, engaging them and all that other feel-good stuff.
I think all of those reasons are good, and I am generally in favor of this process. The trick is to know where the limits are. The key to UPC is to exercise the same level of judgment and ethics with this material that you do with staff content or wire content. We got a good lesson in this yesterday morning, when a reader sent us what appeared to be a fabulous photo of the eclipse. See ECLIPSE1 above. Everybody got excited. We were ready to post it and to move it into a position of prominence on our home page. Our photo editor, Walt Unks, was working with the photo to tone it more properly and discovered that it wasn’t all it seemed to be. See ECLIPSE2. So, for what will be obvious reasons, this picture got yanked.
Your host is Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's a forum to discuss the media, from 
Joethink sent me…
Thanks for sharing this, I always wondered how much this happens.
User submitted content is really the fuel to the internet..without it we would just end up with duplicate stories/content. This mmorpg community site is actually paying people for this user submitted content…I think the wave of the future is people getting paid for their efforts versus site owners.
I agree that there is likely to be a growing tussle between content providers (them) and content disseminators (us). In the old days, our power was in owning a printing press, a large and expensive piece of equipment. We still have the press, but on the electronic side, what the media also has is distribution power. This isn’t to say the right video or photo can’t go viral on YouTube or whathaveyoutube, but for most content, a lack of distribution limits its viewership. We do pay people for some content—freelancers, great photos—but for many people the “payment” comes in the wider audience we deliver.
Thnx for writing.
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