Krishwords

Howard Owens makes a case against the widespread belief that big media companies are resorting to user generated content as a cost cutting measure

Take Bakersfield.com, for example. Visit and invest some time to dig into the community building effort there. Adding that functionality wasn’t cheap, but more importantly, there is a real effort there to build community, not just generate free content. TBC does actively solicit user-submitted news and feature articles for the web and print editions, but most of the UGC that comes in through Bakersfield.com is never even surfaced in any meaningful way. It survives purely as part of conversation, not content aimed at replacing paid staff. In fact, TBC has three or four people on staff just to handle the load of all that UGC.

Is that cheaping out on free content?

To do UGC right is far from cheap. It takes good people and good software.