The biggest threat to professional journalists is neither declining ad revenues nor social media, but rather a growing realization that the public can generate content more efficiently and more profitably.
On Wednesday, BuzzFeed launched a new section called “Community,” where users will contribute all of the content. As PaidContent points out, BuzzFeed has always encouraged users to submit material, and has thrived off of community publishing. But this new “vertical” brings user generated content into the spotlight, emphasizing the sustainability of an entirely user-powered platform.
Community verticals threaten professional journalists because they cost the company nothing. Consider the case of, well, a lemonade stand. If my kid (note: I do not have a kid) hired strangers to mix up batches of lemonade, she would make less money than if she recruited her friends to squeeze lemons for free.
What of the quality, though? Maybe these strangers are really professional lemonade-experts equipped with secret recipes and special knowledge of the lemon-squeezing process. Perhaps their lemonade is more delicious, more refreshing, and marketable to a more upscale demographic. It’s true that user-generated content, in this tortured analogy the poor lemon drippings of the neighborhood gang, is rougher than the professional stuff. It cannot be marketed to the exact same audience. And BuzzFeed’s new vertical, unlike Reddit or other community networks, doesn’t make a play to traditional journalism. The product falls into the “cats doing funny things” bucket. Nevertheless, the kind of content featured on BuzzFeed will continue to marginalize stories framed by traditional journalistic paradigms.
Despite the very real possibility that the decline of traditional journalism will impair democratic politics, it is more likely that community participation in journalism will enhance opportunities for political participation. If more conventional media companies also adopt community verticals, the voice of the people, however diversely composed, will become a legitimate source of commentary on the news. Instead of being filtered through institutions artificially committed to certain political positions, that voice will reach mass audiences—and perhaps itself—in a rawer form. Once we abandon our investment in the formal qualities of professional journalism so fundamental to its status as a commodity, we will be able to accept a community vertical as of equivalent value to the univocal journalist.