Research by Neil Thurman and Alfred Hermida into participatory journalism in Britain, presented at the International Communication Association conference in Montreal in May 2008, took the term to mean the technical, editorial and managerial processes by which readers’ contributions are elicited, processed and published at professional titles. Thurman’s baseline survey in 2004 found the practice unevenly spread: only one of the national news sites surveyed hosted real blogs with comments enabled, one national newspaper website offered readers no way to contribute at all, and where contributions were possible, editing or pre-moderation applied in 80 per cent of cases. The then editor of Telegraph.co.uk summed up the mood — editing and joining in was “a load of fun but it just detracts from what a traditional idea of journalism is”.
What decided adoption was not principle but circumstance: time and resources, the legal environment, the preparedness of management and journalists, and a site’s technical infrastructure. Editors valued contributions as a source of stories and a route to loyalty, while keeping the gate. Self-interest ran underneath it — a fear of being left behind, and a worry that reporters denied a piece of property on the internet would build an audience elsewhere.
By May 2008 three national newspaper websites were publishing comments without registration or pre-moderation, and the format taxonomy had grown to include reader blogs at The Sun. Contributions were still mostly short comments on subjects editors had chosen. The conclusion was that the industry had built an architecture of publication for audience material rather than an architecture of participation.