Old media news groups that have put up news websites have had inconsistent success due to factors like the costs of moderation and the inconsistent quality of their user-generated content (UGC). As a result, readers are not all that excited about it.

You know what that means, right? Yes, we eat their lunch.

In a New Media & Society article(1), Neil Thurman of City University London states that despite a full-court press by old media to embrace Web 2.0 concepts, their own restrictions have caused readers to participate less than they would like. So some of them are considering it a failure.

I read things like this and I shake my head in wonder. Web 2.0 today is like the WWW of 1999 in many ways. People thought if they threw up a website to sell dog food, it would somehow be better than buying dog food down the street. In the past 8 months I have had phone calls from various journalists or media reps who have wondered why our brand of Science 2.0 has worked well and others have stagnated.

The answer is simple; let people write. Regulating deregulation is what led us here in California to a huge energy crisis in 2001. Telling energy companies you will deregulate them but they can't own power lines or sign long term contracts or change prices is the kind of thing that, well, old media would come up with. Innovation by committee.

So it goes with new media. It's not just throwing up a section on a website and assuming you are now a web 2.0 company.

The BBC News website's 'Have Your Say' feature is getting just 0.05 percent of the site's daily viewers. Well, why would they expect more? Putting an audience in 'sandbox' mode is patronizing but the BBC has teams of lawyers cautioning editors about legal liabilities if they don't.

Then you have other sites that agonize over spelling, grammar, decency, unbalanced views and general uselessness of input. Really, only the old media could find a way to make user participation and reader generated content more expensive than straight journalism, yet they have. In Thurman's survey, 4 out of 5 of the new media initiatives launched news organizations were edited or pre-moderated.

You see something similar today with 'corporate' blogs that are really just marketing pieces written for executives (exception: John Battelle has always had a good blog, though given that his Federated Media ads there are consistently showing DoubleClick defaults he might want to spend some time building that fill rate up instead.) - basically, the audience can smell a rat and they can tell when you care.

Does our way always work? No, occasionally we get cranks and three times a week we get someone who wants to write about things that don't make sense, like a new definition for Pi or how "permeable jello we are continually squeezing through conducts our circuitry through timespace" but for the most part the community moderates the content.

This is something that old media has yet to realize. The original intent of the World Wide Web was bringing people together, interacting and creating communities. Web 2.0 is taking that back. I can save those old media companies a lot of money with this advice: trust your readers.

(1) Forums for citizen journalists? Adoption of user generated content initiatives by online news media, New Media & Society, Vol. 10, No. 1, 139-157 (2008) DOI: 10.1177/1461444807085325

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