YouTube Direct Gives News Orgs A Way To Accept User-Submitted Videos
Love it orhate it, there’s no doubt that “citizen journalism” - the trend where ‘regular people’ record video, snap photos, and tweet live from breaking newsevents — is quickly gaining steam, writes Jason Kincaid on Techcrunch.com. One of the biggest catalysts for the trend has been YouTube, which gives people an easy way to upload and share the video footage they shoot from the heat of the action. And while we’ve seen some media sites, like CNN’s iReport, attempt to take advantage of this user submitted content, many news sites haven’t found a good way to integrate it.
Today, YouTube is launching a new application that looks to make this easy for all media organizations. Dubbed YouTube Direct, the new open source application will allow newsorgs to integrate a video upload tool directly into their sites, wherethey can accept and review user uploaded footage.
The new tool will allow news organizations to screen video uploadsas they come in, and use the best clips for their broadcasts and ontheir websites. Of course, news organizations will still be responsiblefor actually curating the content to ensure that it’s accurate, whichis a task that will require additional manpower for the more popularnews sites. All video content uploaded through these tools will be available on YouTube proper as well.
My biggest concern with this kind of reporting is always credibility— oftentimes you’ll come across videos on YouTube that seem likethey’re relevant to breaking news, but are unable to determine who uploaded the clip. Fortunately, as an open source tool YouTube Directallows organizations to customize their submission process. Hopefully, the more credible ones will require (or at least encourage) uploadersto leave their contact information, so that fact checkers can follow upon their video reports to ensure their validity.
News organizations aren’t the only sites looking to accept usergenerated videos, either — YouTube Direct will work that any site thatwants to upload video content, so we should probably expect to see somemore creative uses in the future.
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