Interview with Meg Pickard, Guardian Head of Digital Engagement

Meg Pickard is Head of Digital Engagement at the Guardian

What exactly does ‘Digital Engagement’ mean?

Good question! “Digital Engagement” is a catch-all term describing all kinds of participation in and around our digital products by users, journalists and staff. It touches tools and technologies as well as skills, approaches and policies.

When did UGC online first begin?

UGC in its broadest sense – content and objects created and distributed by users rather than formal organisations – is as old as the web. Message boards, including early versions like USENET contained content created by users, and early personal web pages (homepages) were created by people on platforms like Geocities, Angelfire and Tripod, back in the mid 90s. Hand-coded in HTML, and often containing eye-bleeding animated gifs and scrolling marquee text, these homepages were “user generated content”.

Blogging has been around in various forms since the late 90s, but the launch of Blogger (slogan: “push-button publishing for the people”) in late 1999 is a good marker. It didn’t become “mass” until probably the launch of their hosted service, Blogspot in late 2000, I think, and subsequent purchase by Google (2003) though other services (like Livejournal) were gaining popularity at the same time. I’ve been blogging since January 2000.

In the mid-noughties sites and services like MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and so on acted as catalysts to inspire and extend personal creativity online. The latter two became interesting because the content objects were presented out of the context of the individual, which we’d seen in blogs and homepages. It became just videos or photos, like content ahead of person. Interesting times! So UGC (a horrible phrase) became popularised in the mid-noughties, but it’s been around for a lot longer.

What do you see as being the main advantages/ benefits of UGC?

Big question! In brief:

- the means of production is in the hands of consumers (not just organisations)

- democratisation of information

- able to reflect breadth of experience, insight, opinion etc

- individuals are experts in things (including their own experiences)

- not instead of traditional broadcast forms of media – as well as

- challenges power balance of traditional publishing models

What do you see as being the pitfalls of UGC?

- reputation/legal risk for hosting brands

- management overhead (takes looking after – tools, skills, resources, time)

- challenges power balance of traditional publishing models

Do we still view the journalist in traditional, non-online terms? Is the online journalist’s role of crowd-scouting for UGC still a journalistic activity?

Yes and yes. I think in a world of increasing noise, a journalist’s role becomes more valuable rather than less. They become expert curators, trusted guides, insightful subject specialists and analysts of particular contexts. As information grows, we will increasingly need better filters.

During the 2009 Expenses Scandal the Guardian took a bold approach to curating the expenses data which included recrods of every MP’s expenses claims for four years. Every receipt, every claim and every piece of correspondence between MPs and fees office staff was detailed, and the Guardian allowed the public to play a role in annotating this data, an unprecedented step. How did this take place?

The Guardian expenses collaboration- annotation tool was a really interesting experiment. People didn’t need a degree in accountancy to take part, they simply had to press a button to highlight what was interesting. It wasn’t a wiki type document – it was a tool which enabled them to tell us whether something was interesting or not. So it acted like a heatmap, guiding journalists to stories which they wouldn’t have had time to find alone. But UGC/social media/participatory/collaborative journalism does enable readers to influence and extend stories. There is a trust there extended to our readers. The Guardian didn’t say ‘can you do this so our journalists can relax?’ We allowed users to  perform a democratic act in accessing the information themselves. Our readers could check up on their own MPs. 24,000 people took part over 4 days. There were 500,000 pages of documents, which you can see here: http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/

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