Peter Horrocks, head of the BBC Newsroom, has a long post at The BBC Editors blog on the value of citizen journalism.
From the post, which is largely based on a speech he gave to the University of Leeds' Institute of Communications Studies:
Citizen journalism - for the 1% or the 99%?
Ten days ago, just hours after the death of Benazir Bhutto, we considered turning off the comment facility on that story on the BBC News website. It was only a fleeting notion but that we could consider, however briefly, freezing this important part of BBC News' service tells you something about the power and the potential danger of the intensity of the interaction between the contributing public, journalists and audiences. And it raises the question of how much attention and resource news organisations should devote to this rapidly burgeoning aspect of our journalism.
Let me explain more about the Bhutto response. As is usual after major stories, our team quickly put up a Have Your Say forum to get reaction to her death. As you probably know there is a facility for users to recommend comments that previous people have posted. Here are a few of the top half dozen comments, with the number of people who eventually ended up recommending the views.
"That's the way politics works with The Religion of Peace." 828
"Religion of Peace strikes again."717
"Is this another example of the wonderful tolerance for which, or so we are constantly being told, Islam is famous?
Its time the rest of the world stopped making excuses for this barbaric, dark ages way of life and completely condemned the casual brutality continually perpetrated by so many of the religion's supporters." 565The vehemence and the unanimity of these opinions against the Muslim religion were striking. So why did we consider freezing this forum? A small part of our thinking was that in the context of the death of a significant international figure, who was herself Muslim, we thought that the weight of remarks could be offensive to some users of the BBC News website. Might some readers believe that such views as "most recommended" represented an editorial line by BBC News? I suspect not, but there was that danger. But our real question was the editorial value of the comments and how far they should influence our coverage more widely. And the answers to that were: very little and hardly at all.
The top 20 or 30 recommended posts all had variations on the theme, attacking Islam in comprehensive terms. Most of them weren't making distinctions between different aspects of Islam, they were simply damning the religion as a whole. To be honest it was pretty boring wading through them and wouldn't have added much to anyone's understanding of the causes or consequences of the assassination. Buried amongst the comments however, rarely recommended by others, were insights from those who had met Benazir or knew her. And there were valuable eye witness comments from people who were at the scene in Rawalpindi. Our team that deals with user content sifted through the chaff to find some excellent wheat.
And of course in the end we didn't cut off that Have Your Say forum. The BBC has made a commitment to listening to the views of its audience. And I have no doubt how any attempt to down-play or disregard their comments would have been seen - as censorship and a conspiracy by the BBC to prevent their strongly held views.