Despite recent reports that blogging is dead traditional media companies are still rushing to embrace UGC – User Generated Content – and in many ways that’s great. Except User Generated Content is the wrong framing and so risks failing to deliver the benefits it might. I also find it a rather rude term.

Newspapers and media companies are all trying to embrace UGC — they are blogging and letting folk comment on some of their articles — and if Adam Dooley of snoo.ws is right with good reason, he suggests that UGC might be saving the newspapers.

I don’t think it’s coincidental that this [growth in] popularity has come since many papers have embraced both the Internet’s immediacy (real time news is the thing) and its ability to foster debate and discussion with readers. It’s also come since major papers such as the New York Times have taken the locks off their content making most or all of it free online.

But depressingly UGC is also seen by some as no more than a way to get content on the cheap from a bunch of mindless amateurs, geeks and attention seekers. This view and indeed the very term itself helps to create a dichotomy between professional journalists and the like on one side and everybody else on the other. As Scott Karp points out:

There is a revolution in media because people who create blogs and MySpace pages ARE publishers, and more importantly, they are now on equal footing with the “big,” “traditional” publishers. There has been a leveling of the playing field that renders largely meaningless the distinction between “users” and “publishers” — we’re all publishers now, and we’re all competing for the finite pie of attention. The problem is that the discourse on trends in online media still clings to the language of “us” and “them,” when it is all about the breakdown of that distinction.

Sure most bloggers don’t have the audience of the online newspapers and media companies and there are plenty of people who, as the New Scientist article points out, are simply attention seekers. But that still doesn’t make them ‘users’ and nor does it mean that they’re ‘generating content’ anymore than any other publisher – indeed one might argue that they are less ‘content generators’ than professional journalists. As I sit here writing this post am I a user? If I am I have no idea what I’m using other than WordPress, and if I am then so must journalists be users of their CMS. I know one thing for sure, I don’t think of myself as a user of someone’s site and I don’t create content for them. I suspect most people are the same.

Bloggers, those that contribute to Wikipedia, or otherwise publish content on the Web are amateur publishers — in the same way that amateur sportsmen and women are amateur athletes, whatever their ability — until they give up their day job. But that doesn’t necessarily make them any less knowledgeable about the subject they are writing about. Indeed an ‘amateur publisher’ might well know much more about the subject they are writing about than a professional journalist because they have direct person experience of their subject matter. Whether that be a technical blog by someone who helps make the technology, a news story written on Wikinews or BreakingNewsOn by someone that was there and experienced the events being written about, or even the man that invented the Web. Are any of these people doing UGC? I don’t know what they think – but I know that when I write for this blog, or upload a photo to Flickr – I don’t think I’m generating user content, I’m not doing UGC.

It seems to me that newspapers and media companies need to work to understand how amateur publishers and others can contribute. Not that that is easy — the best bloggers know their subject inside-out, more so than any professional journalist — but equally there is plenty of drivel out there, in both the amateur and professional spheres. For sure there are dreadful blogs, YouTube is full of inane video and fatuous comments but equally partisan news outlets like Fox News, the Daily Mail present biased, misleading and often downright inaccurate reporting. In the week of the US Presidential Elections it is worth considering whether Barack Obama’s use of the Internet — including the role of amateur publishers, UGC if you like — helped dull the effect of such biased news reporting which has historically had a significant role.

The trick then is to find the best content, whoever has written it, and bring it to the fore for people to read and debate. To understand what it is about the Web that makes it an effective communication medium and to harness that in whatever way that that makes sense for each context. Considering the Web in the same patronising fashion as the Culture and Media Secretary Andy Burnham does, that is as “…an excellent source of casual opinion” fails to recognise the value that debate and discussion can bring to a subject.