YouTube & News

A New Kind of News Emerges on YouTube

The Project for Excellence in Journalism (Pew Research Center) Says fully a third of all searches on You Tube are for news. The implication for news organizations is that they need to have their content on You Tube. For radio and print journalism, this offers a challenge.

We started talking about have video content on the web at the public radio station I managed in 2006. Reporters are supplied with digital cameras and encouraged to take stills for web content when covering a story. There were a few forays into video content but issues arose.

• Reporters complained that shooting video would get in the way of their reporting.
• There was not enough storage space for the videos on our servers.
• Financial restraints at our joint licencee made it impossible to buy or rent enough storage space. It was not seen as a priority for radio.
• The union that governed the video production on the TV side grieved individual reporters for shooting and editing video for web only content.

In the end...not much happened. Video on radio was forgotten.

Here it is 2012. You Tube news searches are now one-third of all searches on You Tube.
Working past the issues would have put the station in a much better position to have its content on a platform used by millions of viewers. Nobody was really against the idea. The opportunity has not been missed but, the station could be much further ahead.



YouTube & News: A New Kind of Visual News | Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)