Why Does User-Generated Content (UGC) Matter? Dr. Siti Suriani Othman Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia suriani@usim.edu.my / ssuriani3979@gmail.com Executive Summary: This discussion brings up issue of how and why User-Generated Content (UGC) matters specifically in terms of journalism practice and ethics. Based on current literature, UGC is a mass activity performed by both professional journalists and untrained citizen. While the use of UGC provide diverse coverage on various matters, it is also threatening journalism in terms of credibility and trustworthiness. UGC does matter all of us, because all of us are producing UGC every day, content sharing is massive and leads to the question of how long legacy of journalism will survive as the pillar of democracy. Introduction User-Generated Content (UGC) is growing, it is deniable. When we see ordinary citizen posting on social media platforms, posting videos on Youtube and upload writings online, those are considered the act of producing UGC. Generally speaking, when content is produced by ordinary untrained citizens and shared to the public, they are producing public content. Although previously this act was performed by professional journalists, curating content is now a mass act, or also known as citizen journalism which is also known as participatory journalism, open-source journalism, grassroot journalism, hyper-local journalism, reciprocal journalism or hybrid mode of journalism. In essence, Professor Melissa Wall in her study on citizen journalism found that this form of journalism suggests certain level of involvement of audience in the process of news production. Today, citizen journalism is impacting our society in various levels of life activities, including the landscape of journalism as a field, such as the quest for a new journalism model and changing the epistemology of journalism. Why UGC matters? Dr Chung, Professor Nah and Dr Yamamoto in “Conceptualizing Citizen Journalism” argue that UGC produced by citizen journalists today has undeniably affect practices of journalism in terms of creating a blurring line between content and producer, and
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