Simon Bucks – Sky News

Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn in International

Becuase of the special election taking place in the UK, Simon is unable to attend the conference.

Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.

I look after UGC on the Sky News website www.sky.com/news

What are your goals?

To increase user participation and UGC traffic, and thus build the brand.

Notable achievements?

Since I started the job in February I have moved from having a couple of staff journo blogs to discussion boards, photo boards, a quiz and more blogs – and I am planning a mass blogging exercise to launch by the end of the year.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)

Too many to list here! The biggest one was to rush into discussion boards (under pressure from managers) without doing enough research or testing on either the front end or back end – usability for users and web production staff is vital.

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?

See above. Mass blogging exercise aimed at next UK general election (assuming it is NOT this autumn) designed to capture citizen reporting of the campaign, rolling in stills and video as well as text. Very ambitious and quite scary.

Anyone you’d particularly like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit

Anyone who can contribute ideas for the sort of stuff we are trying to do. Jeff and Jay Rosen are helping with our itinerary.