(Limor Peer)

Earlier this month, Yahoo and Reuters announced that they are teaming up to regularly use photos and video submitted by ordinary citizens. The new service, You Witness News, is "a systematic way to incorporate images covering a wider range of topics into news coverage" according to a New York Times story.

This venture not only broadens the range of news topics, it also officially opens the gates to non-professionals to participate in the news process. Lloyd Braun, who runs Yahoo's media group, was quoted in the story as saying, "People don't say, 'I want to see user-generated content'… They want to see Michael Richards in the club. If that happens to be from a cell phone, they are happy with a cell phone. If it's from a professional photographer, they are happy for that, too."

Many have blogged about this development in the past week (see different perspectives here and here), and the conversation was mostly predictable: those who see this as regrettable on the one side and those who see this as inevitable on the other.

But one perspective caught my eye because I think it gets right to the main point. Mindy McAdams writes in her blog that she tried to upload photos onto You Witness News and found it wasn't so easy and straightforward to use. This led her to wonder what would possibly make her feel compelled to submit something to this site rather than just posting it to YouTube or taking it to the local network affiliate.

To me, this gets at a critical aspect of the citizen journalism phenomenon -- what motivates people to contribute their own original content? And how can traditional news organizations effectively tap into these motivations?

McAdams lists different motivations such as pay, fame, and respect and concludes that none get rewarded on You Witness News very well (Reuters will pay people if it chooses to distribute the images to its clients, but Reuters and Yahoo will not pay for displaying the images on their own sites; first and last names are credited, but without links or emails).

Howard Owens, responding to McAdams, suggests that what gets people to put their videos and photos on YouTube or Flickr isn't any of these. It's the sense of being part of a community that drives people to share their photos, their images, their stories. YouTube is evidence of this because it's incredibly successful even though it offers no pay, no fame (unless you use your real name for a screen name), and limited interaction. What it does offer is community.

People flock to sites that offer a community and an opportunity to interact with other people. This year's USC-Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future study confirms that the number of people who belong to online communities has grown, and that they are more active than in the past. Our own research shows that the more people feel the site connects them with others, the more they'll use it.

So what are news sites to do about this? On this blog, my colleague Rich Gordon talked about what it takes to successfully build an online community here and here. I previously wrote here about ways news sites can help users connect with each other.

The main point is that news sites should think of efforts such as You Witness News from the users' perspective -- what's in it for the user? Why should they share on your site? It seems the answer has to do with community and the ability to be part of a conversation.


By Limor Peer (l-peer@northwestern.edu)
Limor Peer is research director for the Media Management Center and Readership Institute.