Towards a Semantic-oriented Model of Participatory Journalism Management

Perceptions of User-generated Content

Abstract

During the last two decades, citizens’ participation in news production process has raised great academic and entrepreneurial interest for participatory journalism. Traditional procedures and concepts such as gate keeping have been under discussion. News organizations redesign their websites in order to adopt tools and applications that make it possible for users to be active consumers or even co-producers of journalistic content, by liking, sharing, commenting and submitting material. At the same time, huge amounts of user-generated content are uploaded every minute on social media platforms. Subsequently, professionals have to deal with continually available information, which requires management, classification and evaluation in order to keep high journalistic standards and to avoid problems, varying from plain grammar mistakes to serious situations of fake news, hostility or hate speech. Thus, there is the obvious need for a new model of managing participatory journalism, based on semantic technologies, which will support organized collection and moderation of content in an effective way and in short time. The main objective of this paper is to define the requirements and describe the characteristics that the model should have. For this purpose, two online surveys of journalists and users were conducted in Greece, in order to gain some insights concerning the development of the model. The paper presents the key findings from the surveys and identifies the views, the preferences and the experiences as expressed by the respondents, which lead to the tendency towards a collaborative, semantic-oriented way of submitting and receiving user-generated content.