VIBI. Supporting journalists to manage and verify visual user-generated content

Abstract

With the emergence of social media, user-generated content (UGC) has become an increasingly part of the journalistic workday. Though it can be viewed as an enrichment for the media and journalism, it also brings new challenges such as the time-consuming and important tasks of finding, evaluating and verifying content to ensure the content is newsworthy and of journalistic quality before presenting it as news. This study reports the results of an empirical study of how newsrooms work with visual user-generated content and their practices, as a part of the requirement and content gathering for a prototype to support novice journalist with managing and verifying visual user-generated content. Followed by an evaluation of the prototype’s usability and the users experience of the design. The study is finalized with a reflection of the implications of the findings for when designing a tool to support journalists dealing with UGC.