During a workshop on the economics of journalism at the MSH Paris-Nord, Denis Ruellan talked about a study he’s carrying out on 3 famous French media bloggers (Jeff Mignon, Benoît Rafael and Francis Pisani).

He aims at understanding the evolution of their opinion on User-Generated Content over the years. He explained that at no point did any of the 3 bloggers thought of UGC outside of the realm of journalists.

The value journalists add nowadays lies in organizing information. Web-users seemingly need a journalist to head their information experience.

In spite of this, quite a few systems exist that can produce and organize information without a journalistic core. Wikipedia does quite well at aggregating information and knowledge, while Digg hierarchizes information, for example.

Even when talking about breaking news or developing events, users/actors can organize information – and they do so on their own. Californians successfully put out detailed and up-to-date reports of the wildfires’ progression when these ravaged their area.

A professional journalist’s main role is to produce content that will then be sold to advertisers and readers. Her main preoccupation: please the reader and give the advertiser a safe place for his brand. More often than not, a journalist also wants to promote her worldviews. Most of them got into the trade to ‘change the world’, not to describe it.

The journalist’s centrality in UGC systems has more to do with reassuring advertisers and keeping an editorial line than with the precision of information.

On the contrary, information has a real impact on people involved in an event. (If the fire gets too close to my house, I’ll start packing, for instance). When they spread out the information they own, users/actors get involved in a gift economy, or even in pure altruism (see this paper on the Wikipedians’ motivations).

If I put out information with a lot of added-value (« the fires just got passed Interstate 15 »), I hope that others will also publish information I’ll be able to use. Before the web, this kind of interaction would occur between 2 people over the phone. Twitter, blogs and wikis allow for the same rationale to be replicated on a wider scale.

We have to differentiate between information and journalist-generated content. Both don’t always go hand-in-hand. Journalism has more to do with entertainment than information.