YouTube links citizen journalists with news services

 

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By Stuart Turton and Reuters

Posted on 17 Nov 2009 at 10:46

YouTube has launched a service allowing "citizen journalists" to submit videos of celebrities and events, such as disasters, for use by news services.

Citizen journalists - people on the site of major events, or just hassling celebrities with camera and videophones - have become a massive part of news coverage in recent years.

As part of the service, dubbed Direct, news outlets will now be able to request video content by posting a clip outlining their needs to the site.

"News organisations always want to verify the content they use," says Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube. "It's an incentive to upload great video, because of the recognition you'll get from legitimate news organisations."

The service is currently only available to US news outlets, with the Huffington Post, NPR, Politico, San Francisco Chronicle and a couple of Boston TV stations, already signed up.

One examples picked out by Grove of newsworthy user-generated video is the coverage of presidential candidate George Allen's "Macaca" reference.

He also highlighted a video of a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in China and a teacher screaming at and slapping an autistic student.