Web 2.0, conversational media, user-created content and all that are already old news. However, it’s only in the past year or so that the Finnish “mainstream” media has awoken to the existence of blogs, user-created content and all that.
Lately, I’ve been thinking awoken is the wrong word – exploitation may be better. On the theme of blogs, many magazines, media companies and newspapers (and, lately, increasingly political parties due to the upcoming elections) in Finland have started running a series of blogs written by their staff. Most of these blogs are uninteresting and dumb, with the writers having no idea what blogs are all about. Some have clearly been just told to write a blog without their own motivation.
Then there’s the user-created content part. In most cases with the “old” media, this has come to mean utilizing the readership in usually one of two ways: one option is to set up an open channel (like an SMS number) and then publish readers’ comments on anything and everything – like Uutislehti 100. The other option is to set up a “themed” feedback channel like a discussion forum or a blog with perhaps a short post or a question to arouse comments and views from the readers. Some of the submitted comments are then published in their printed media, like Helsingin Sanomat does.
Whatever the approach, one thing is in common to most; they all take the readers’ comments and use them to fill in their newspaper or magazine or whatever. In some cases, entire columns consist of comments to some author’s blog post or entire pages full of SMS-comments are printed. So if people are clearly willing to do this, what’s the problem?
The problem is it’s clearly profitable contents for their publications but the contributors do not get compensated at all. In the most blatant cases, people are actually paying to get their message on these forums, like the useless SMS forum at Uutislehti 100. To their credit, however, Uutislehti 100 does pay nominal compensation for published readers’ photos, while most other media have graciously started only “accepting” media material from their reader- and viewership. Not a word of compensation.
In essence they’re ripping off their customers by using them – for free – to create the content they are paying for. Would you pay to read or see stuff you made? I didn’t think so.
