03.09.2010 at 4:18 pm | Have your say »

GEO.de: Yes to photos, no to text from users

Such an attitude is evident when it opened new avenue for its travel community members to take part in the content generation.
It might receive high quality pictures from its travel community. However, it soon discovers that a single perfect picture would not work wonders to tell a story its readers need.
“Our editors found that some pictures were good and we decided to publish them on our magazines. Unfortunately, many of them have not been supported by strong stories to put more flesh on those pictures,” said GEO.de Editor in Chief Christoph Kucklick.
Kucklick emphasized that the quality of the photos were not the major issue, but the narrative stories surrounding the pictures.
“That’s one of the problems with the user-generated contents. People might not have time to write stories. But uploading pictures might be the easiest way to do after returning from their travels,” Kucklick said.
“We, for instance, initiated a photo contest. However, we found that there were lots of single pictures that didn’t tell a story,” he said.
GEO.de project manager Daniel Olzien concurred.
“If we want to get journalistic narrative story, then we go to professionals but if we want a great single picture, we can use that sent by the users,” Olzien said.
“It may be not the highest editorial quality but it is all right,” Olzien said.
Currently, there have been more than 120,000 pictures uploaded by its members.
He added that in that sense, the role of professional journalists to deliver complete stories along with pictures was irreplaceable.
“We can expect our journalists to do research for one month or two and make sure that they will submit complete narrative reports upon their return. That’s something we can not expect from those who are not professional journalists,” he said.
He added that the magazine rarely asked contributors to submit stories to complete their pictures.
“It happened twice or three, but we don’t do that usually,” he asserted. “We don’t go to [other] travel community sites to complete the stories. Instead, we assign professional photographers to do it [the picture and story] for us,” he said.

GEO.de Editor in Chief Christoph Kucklick explains GEO.de site plan to reporters.

Imminent impediments in user-generated contents
Kucklick admitted that the quality for their online publication was currently not on par with its print publication.
“We don’t have fact-checkers to vet stories on our online department as we have in our print department. It is just simply because we can not afford it,” he said.
He said that among the main reasons it was not to leap into the bandwagon of multimedia frenzy was partly due to practicality concerns and cost factor.
“We have a tight deadline of three weeks to come up with standard reports. We cannot compromise late story submission,” he said.
According to him, the raw materials from the users often require more hard work and more time from the editorial staff to fine-tune the contents to the quality required by the magazine.
Since the monthly magazine is doing featured stories instead of hard news and event-based stories, the magazine doesn’t think the urgency to flex its muscle to work on online section.
“There has been strong idea among the editors that they are the one who know the best what to do and they would tell the readers,” he said. “There are still reservations about online in some areas.”

A visitor checks GEO.de website.

Striving for excellence in fact-check
GEO.de is known for its excellence in the quality publications thanks to its careful eyes of its fact-checkers who vet the sources, stories and pictures prior to publications.
“We do fact-check very rigorously. Sometimes, we took the risk of rewriting the whole story should we find that the story doesn’t meet our required standard,” Kucklick said.
He added mistakes did happen but “it was rare.”
He added that the company had learnt from past mistake when it published a picture, which later it discovered the picture they published having been tampered with.
“We resort to hiring a visual forensic technician to go into the raw data to find whether the pictures are original,” he said.
“People who send the pictures should also reserve all the rights on the photos,” he said.

A sample of GEO magazine covers is displayed at GEO office in Hamburg, Germany.

GEO.de and its promising online arm
The first edition of GEO.de appeared in Germany in 1976. The magazine has been published in at least 18 languages. It also publishes special themed editions, such as Geo Saison that covers tourism, Geo Special that discusses countries or cities, Geo Wissen and Geo Kompakt on science, Geo Epoche on history and Geo lino for children.
According to Kucklick, the market of the print publications is indeed in the doldrums amid prolong economic crisis.
“Last year, we even suffer a 25 percent decline in ad revenue. Not to mention a downturn in subscription from 380,000 to 360,000, down from the record of selling 500,000 back in 10 years ago,” Kucklick said.
He doesn’t detail the ad income.
“But, it seems that we would not see any growth this year, too,” he said.
The good news comes from the online section.
“Although we are still investing [in online section], we manage to make money from our website so far, which we use partly to finance the operations of our website,” he added.

Related link:
GEO.de


| Tagged Case Studies