Colleague Dr Claire Wardle said times had since changed, with the BBC UGC hub of 23 journalists now based in the heart of the newsroom and dealing with 10-20,000 emails a day.

She added: “Now, every day on the hub there’s a core team out on Flickr and Twitter looking for news stories, going to where the conversation is taking place rather than waiting for it to come to them. The hub has an awareness of how it (social media) works, and is trying to get the rest of the BBC to take it on board.”

Examples of Old Media not giving much credibility to user generated content. That view has evolved at the BBC, at least, to rely on the hive mind as a filter for what is news.

Journalism, by and large, has been a product produced by writers and editors and delivered to an audience. That was fine when there was no technology to allow journalists to engage in an ongoing dialogue with readers and to allow for true collaboration between the writers and the readers.

What journalism needs to become is this digital age is a process that embraces and involves your audience at every level, from idea generation to reporting and sourcing and finally to the publication of the article when the journalism then becomes an intellectual camp fire around which you gather an audience to have a thoughtful conversation about the story’s topic. 

BW suggests evolving from a Broadcast medium to an Interactivite medium. Not interested in just Page views but more importantly, engagement metrics. Businessweek’s argument is the increased interactivity between journos and readers increases the value of their product in a competitive market. (via @niemanlab)

I found this quite inspiring. 79 page PDF. The wife actually pointed me to it. Was that a hint?