Pete Clifton, head of BBC News Interactive talking about citizen Journalism

February 13th, 2006

Peter Clifton Head of the BBC News Interactive in conversation with conversation with Jemima Kiss

The wider internet community has an ethos of contribution and collaboration without financial incentive. Is it exploitative for commercial news organisations to publish the public’s free contributions, or would a culture of paid amateur content start to erode the community spirit of the web?

We have a community of people that enjoy using the site and that want to engage in the debates we have, and on occasion want to share their own photos. In my opinion, the whole spirit of that is diminished if users start to see a dollar sign. We want to harness the feeling of community and concentrate on that.
From a very early stage we have been building on a participatory culture. I’m very uneasy with the idea of using licence fee money to pay contributors.

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