UGC used online was much more likely to be credited. Online has a culture of crediting content, and the ability to embed content directly means there is an implicit form of crediting in place even if no additional watermark or caption is added. As the editor of a UK news website explained, “That’s the great thing about digital. It’s much more collaborative because you can embed content, you have photo expansion via Twitter embeds, that sort of thing. It actually allows you to use a lot more UGC in a much more natural way.” As will be discussed in the following section, almost all online journalists admitted that they often didn’t seek permission for embedding a piece of content sourced from the social Web. If they wished to talk to the uploader
about what they had seen in the hopes of building out a story or verifying an event, they would reach out and seek permission. But if it was simply a case of embedding a picture from Twitter or a video from YouTube, the uploader wasn’t notified. In these situations, an embed is considered a form of credit, but one that television newsrooms just couldn’t physically do.