• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, January 4, 2007

Online newspapers and magazines stand to gain from consumers who decide they want in on the creative process. That's according to a new report by Deloitte & Touche, via Reuters.

Howard Davies, a director of media strategy at Deloitte, told Reuters that TV and print media have room to incorporate social media "to create an overall richer product."

Of course, many online publishers have made efforts to incorporate user-generated content for a while now. They're inviting users to upload photos and videos, write comments and read what bloggers have to say about the articles.

Encouraging readers to become more interactive obviously gives at least some users reason to continue to come back to the site, while not hurting those who wish to more passively consume their media.

But, at the same time, soliciting consumer contributions has some very tangible quality control costs. Experience has proven that unmoderated forums quickly descend into anarchy.

And it's not clear that companies can easily recover the costs of monitoring and moderating content, because consumer content isn't easily monetized. For one thing, not all marketers want to be associated with user-generated content.

Secondly, as Deloitte's Davies told Reuters, the consumers who create content don't necessarily want to be affiliated with marketers. Some dislike ads so strongly that they won't hesitate to take their writings and photos elsewhere, should ads appear near their content. "There's something about the social user ... community that is absolutely not professional and so the community doesn't want it to be commercialized," Davies told Reuters.