Tenth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

Content produced by the general public known as amateur content or user-generated content (UGC) is now routinely incorporated into news narratives. Newsrooms today have specialized roles for handling UGC, and news audiences expect the proximities and presumed authenticities of eyewitness footage in news coverage. The public’s ability to create content is accelerating through new technologies and platforms, and interest in UGC has shifted to what newsrooms refer to as ‘open source intelligence’ – or OSINT – the collection, evaluation and analysis of publicly available sources of information including materials created by the general public. OSINT encompasses more than eyewitness accounts, for example, the use of machine learning, AI and other forms of algorithmic analysis of data. In this paper, we discuss findings from interviews with instructors at journalism schools in France, UK and Canada discussing teaching practices in relation to OSINT. Our findings suggest that not only have OSINT strategies become normalized and are now in many instances inseparable from practices of journalism, but that amateur content –the source and basis of much OSINT data – continues to play a central role in how journalists are taught today. We found a wide range of emergent UGC/OSINT pedagogies in practice including building connection with audiences, establishing OSINT teams in newsrooms, shaping audience engagement to produce targeted content, social media scraping, vertical video, data journalism, incorporating AI into newsroom routines and coding classes for journalists.