Amateur Footage: A Global Study of User-Generated Content

Collection and Analysis of the Qualitative Data

In total, we interviewed 64 people from 38 news organizations based in 24 countries. These people included heads and deputy heads of news, heads of newsgathering or new media, foreign editors, social media editors, bureau chiefs, as well as journalists and producers. (A list of all interviewees is included at the end of the report.) We interviewed representatives of all organizations coded in Part I of the research with the exception of editors from TeleSur and Al Jazeera Arabic, who did not respond to our requests for interview. We traveled to two news industry conferences—News Xchange in Marrakech, Morocco in November of 2013 and the EastWest Center Media Conference in Yangon, Myanmar in March of 2014. These two conferences enabled us to reach a wide variety of global editors and journalists—reach that would have otherwise been impossible—including the Waziristan bureau chief of a Pakistani news organization; editors from Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines; and heads of news from Australia, Canada, and Japan. We also spent one week interviewing journalists in London, enabling us to gain key insights into the workflows of large organizations such as the BBC and CNN, as well as the two main television news agencies, AP and Reuters. The remaining interviews were conducted over Skype or telephone with our own industry contacts, or people recommended to us in other discussions. The interviews were conducted and analyzed as a sequel to the first, quantitative part. The interview questions inquired into the decision-making processes behind the use, labeling, and crediting of UGC content, as well as the discovery and verification of UGC, workflows, training, and vicarious trauma.