BBC to use more UGC as it firms up usage guidelines

Under the new guidelines, the BBC emphasises that it considers payment for submissions that are deemed to be "particularly editorially important or unique", but stressed it did not want to encourage audiences to believe that that payment is the norm.

The BBC guidelines say: "Audiences should not be encouraged to think that payment is the norm, or in any way encouraged to take risks, put themselves in danger or break any laws in order to secure what they perceive to be material of high monetary value."

Payment for viewer submissions is not a new policy at the BBC, but major news events can result in an avalanche of user-generated content. The corporation received more than 20,000 emails after the July 7 London bombings last year, and more than 5,000 responses to the Buncefield oil depot fire in Hertfordshire last December.

In August, Nokia unveiled the winners of its inaugural Citizen Journalism Awards, with an anonymously submitted image of the July 7 Tavistock Square bombings winning outright; David Otway's aerial shot of the Buncefield oil depot fire coming second; and another image of the 7/7 bombings by Alexander Chadwick completing the top three.

American broadcaster CNN has already launched a user-generated content portal on its homepage, featuring video, audio and written reports of what it calls citizen journalism.

Channel 5 said it would pay up to £100 for viewer contributions used for broadcast.

The BBC guidelines state: "Our starting point is that we should aim to apply the same approach to pictures, audio and video supplied by members of the public, as we do to any other material we handle as journalists."

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