Reaching out
- 11 Oct 08, 09:00 AM
Interactivity is a two-way street, so we've started a pilot to report more of the stories you're sending us while at the same time making a bigger effort to reach out and join in conversations on the web outside the BBC's own editorial space.
For some time now the UGC Hub has been successfully making use of remarkable eyewitness images and accounts sent in by people from all over the world, we've been feeding the views and experiences of the BBC's audience into our journalism and occasionally breaking stories - such as the revelation that foreign workers at Heathrow's Terminal 5 don't undergo a criminal records check, a story which came from an e-mail sent into the Hub.
However it has been obvious for some time that there's a lot of other ideas for stories that have been sent in to us that we haven't really been able to investigate properly. They're stories that matter to people but often aren't part of the conventional news processes and weren't getting the attention they deserved so we've decided to try out a reporter whose beat is simply all the content you've been sending in to us - our first Interactive Reporter.
Siobhan Courtney has been with us for a fortnight now and has already scored two major successes - last week she revealed the extent of the initiation rites that students at some British universities undergo. We had exclusive UGC footage sent to us that showed students at one university paraded through the streets with plastic bags over their heads lead by a man in a Nazi uniform. Her story prompted a police investigation into the incident.
This week she has spoken to some of the thousands of students who e-mailed us because they have yet to receive their educational maintenance allowances worth up to £30 a week that encourages them to carry on studying for the A-levels.
She's got lots more stories already in the pipeline - all coming out of the e-mails and texts you've sent in to us, but we're keen to hear from you if you've got a story you think we should be reporting.
At the same time we're very conscious that while we get thousands of e-mails a day sent to us here at the BBC, that is only a drop in the ocean of all the conversations that are going on the web all the time. We already use Twitter everyday, alerting people to the debates we are hosting on the BBC's HYS pages, but on Tuesday night we experimented by opening up channels on video chatrooms Qik, 12Seconds and Phreadz to join in conversations wherever they were happening rather than expect people to come to us and host them on the BBC's platforms.
We wanted to hear what people thought about the US presidential debates and get their views in video rather than in text. It was the first time we have done something like this - starting a conversation on the web outside the BBC - and we tried to approach it in a more informal and open way.
We were really excited by the response - with more than 50 videos posted in around three hours on our Qik channel discussing the VP debate last week. We even edited some of the contributions together and used them on the BBC News website. We learnt a lot about how to go about this kind of thing and are planning to do a lot more of it - but in the true spirit of interactivity, we'd like to hear what you think.
Matthew Eltringham is assistant editor of Interactivity
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