YouTube may be best known for
entertaining, offbeat videos that go viral, but for many people, the video-sharing site has been
their window into the unrest in Iran -- especially after international journalists were kicked out. The site has just unveiled a new effort to improve and promote videos that are newsworthy: the
Reporters' Center.
The Reporters' Center launched Monday with about 35 instructional videos from professional journalists on how to handle a range of reporting challenges, including:
understanding privacy issues (and staying out of jail),
shooting video with your cell phone,
fact-checking assertions,
conducting a good interview and
covering a humanitarian crisis safely.
YouTube wants to use the Reporters' Center to develop collaboration between citizen reporters and large news organizations -- to "more effectively report on news and have that content amplified on a bigger platform," said Steve Grove, the site's head of politics and news.
The project is part of a larger effort to make YouTube a
destination for video news and to cement it as the meeting place for people who witness important events and the organizations that need their accounts.
"YouTube's platform is almost synonymous with citizen reporting," Grove said, noting that when people capture news on their cell phone or video camera -- whether an altercation with police or a bridge collapse -- their first move is to post it to the site.
One component of improving such reporting is the nuts-and-bolts training from professionals such as Katie Couric of the "CBS Evening News" (her video on interviewing is by far the most popular on the channel),
The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof and NPR's Scott Simon. Other tutorials come from organizations that aren't household names, such as the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University and
The UpTake, a Minnesota citizen journalism organization that relies on
crowdsourcing and low-cost video.
All the initial videos come from official YouTube news partners. In a related development, Google News
has put out a call for news organizations to become official YouTube partners. (Among other things, partners get premium placement on
YouTube's news page.)
YouTube also wants people to upload videos with their own tips and experiences covering the news. The site will filter out irrelevant content and spam and has created playlists to group similar content, but doesn't plan to vet the content otherwise.
Grove noted that covering the news is just the first step. Getting people to see a particular video, among the thousands of hours posted every day, is much harder. YouTube has posted a video to the Reporters' Center with
tips on building audience, creating tags to help the video turn up in searches and sending links to news organizations.
But an instructional video can't do all the work. The rest comes from better collaboration between news organizations and citizen reporters. Some news organizations already put their video on YouTube, Grove said, but it's mostly treated as another way to distribute content -- a one-way street.
"How do you engage your audience directly and leverage them to help you report the news even better?" Grove asked. The goal is to get "news companies who are using YouTube to think about their content on YouTube in a different way, a more interactive way."
Among cable news, CNN has been the most aggressive in soliciting contributions with its
iReport project, Grove said, and other news organizations do it informally.
The Reporters' Center project has been in progress for a couple of months. Grove said the launch was delayed about a week so it wouldn't detract from the Iran protests, perhaps the greatest example of the kind of journalism it seeks to promote.
