Crowdsourcing Journalism
I was very impressed when I heard BBC Radio Scotland’s Open All Mics program today. Rather than the live-game-with-studio-updates model which has dominated football radio broadcasting in Scotland since I can remember, Open All Mics mimics the format made popular by Jeff Stelling and his cronies on Sky Sports—Soccer Saturday, I believe they call it (though I’ve always thought myself a football fan!) The format is studio-based and features constant match updates from reporters at the different matches, and discussion between pundits when there’s not much happening.
Anyway, to business. Open All Mics has opened a Twitter account, and have been filling my feed with goal updates all afternoon, like a 2.0 version of the BBC’s legendary Vidiprinter. So far so good, but very one-way. What really impressed me today was that fans attending games were then invited to send in their own half-time reports. This brings in a whole new level of interactivity. While Richard Gordon and the team at the BBC are able to read out the ‘best’ ones, it also allows anyone with a Twitter account to read all of those @messages and get a real flavour of what’s going on around the country. It’s also a very, very cheap method of content generation for the Beeb, so everyone’s a winner, right? (The BBC have also started to read out messages left on the Pie and Bovril messageboard in their TV final score program – something that I have some slight reservations about, since it smacks a bit more of unlicensed use of content; unlike @messages, that are clearly meant for them to use.)
That aside, well done BBC Scotland, for an innovative use of the technology available to you.
Edit: I should say that Open All Mics can be followed at @openallmics!