The BBC launched two participatory journalism initiatives in October 2008, and only one of them was new in kind.
The first was the appointment of an Interactive Reporter, Siobhan Courtney. Matthew Eltringham explained on the BBC Editors blog that her beat was simply all the content the audience had been sending in. Useful, but newsgathering under another name, with the journalist keeping the gate-keeping role intact — CBC in British Columbia was running a comparable project, Go Public, with Kathy Tomlinson investigating tips from the public.
The second was more of a departure. For the United States presidential debates the BBC opened channels on the video services Qik, 12Seconds and Phreadz, and edited some of what came back onto the BBC News website. The purpose, in Eltringham’s words, was to join in conversations wherever they were happening rather than expect people to come to the BBC and host them on its platforms.
For an organisation that had spent years building places for audiences to gather, including the Action Network it had just closed, that was a real shift: the conversation was accepted as taking place across the web, and the BBC’s role in it was to take part and enable rather than to own the venue.