Adoption of User-Generated Content Initiatives by Media Organizations

We are in the times of "participatory media culture". This paper first examines the possibilities by news APPs providing for the user participation. We examine the UGC features presented by nine news APPs, assign variables according to its varying degrees of participation, and present the overall degree of user participation of each news APP. This study also explores the factors behind the adoption of UGC features initiatives in mainstream news organizations, discusses the reasons for the unsatisfactory conditions of user participation in mainstream media journalism practices, and tries to build a whole influencing mechanism of the adoption of UGC initiatives.