- Gordon Brown is about to announce a cabinet re-shuffle
- The global economy faces complete melt-down
- 9 US banks are 'part-nationalised' under part of a $700bn bail-out plan
- David Cameron claims he's a 'man with a plan' at the Conservative Party Conference
- House prices fall for an 11th consecutive month
- The euthanasia debate continues
- Vice-presidential candidates Palin and Biden go head to head in their campaign debate
- North and South Korea open peace negotiations
- Missing explorer Steve Fosset's belongings are found
But wait. Stop press. Hold the front page. All of this takes a back seat on the BBC News agenda, because they've discovered university students drink, sometimes enough to make them sick!
The initiation ceremony story dominated the BBC's news output, getting included in most of the day's TV and radio bulletins and with Victoria Derbyshire's 5live phone-in asking 'Should initiation ceremonies be banned?'
As the day went on, and I saw more and more of this story, I found myself asking 'Why is this story getting so much exposure when there seems to be so much other, more 'newsworthy' stuff going on?' I accept that as a journalism student I don't have the editorial judgement of the BBC Editors, but surely on a day when the world's leading proponent of the free-market has had to part-nationalise huge sections of their finance industry, house prices continue to plummet, and a key member of the 'axis of evil' is tring to get back into the fold, should our attention be focussed on the antics of drunken teenagers?
And then I came across this.
As we were told in our Online Journalism lecture last week, the BBC is going to great-lengths to justify their investment in User Generated Content (UGC), and their UGC-Hub, where BBC staff receive, filter and publish messages, photos and videos sent in by members of the public.
It's an interesting development, the results of which could shape the career path my colleagues and I embark on when we finish our course.
But is it right that the BBC shoe-horn stories into their output because they originated in the UGC Hub?
-----------------------Update 14/10/08-----------------------------
Stumbled across this old, but funny and relevant clip from Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe. Worth a look. (contains swearing)
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