Tips for Crowdsourcing Content

Avoid using the term “user-generated content.”
UGC suggests a “factory farming of content,” said Miner. “If you say crowdsourcing or community editorial, it shows the relationship and the respect and the hard work that goes into it a little bit more.”

The term UGC also can lead some journalists to make false assumptions about the type of content they’ll get.

“When you say user-generated content,” Rich said, “I have found a lot of the time it is either something people are really excited about, or more often there’s terror of opening the floodgates to the audience, who presumably will send a lot of crap in.” People think “you’ll have no ability to control it, and it’ll suck up everybody’s time trying to deal with it.”