YouTube Unveils Tool to Connect News Organizations with Citizen Journalists
MediaPost reports: Google is unveiling a tool Tuesday that enables traditional television and online news agencies to create a platform to manage a bureau of citizen journalists. These mavericks capture life-changing events on camera and upload them to YouTube. It allows media organizations to request, review and rebroadcast these clips directly from YouTube-member pages.
Connecting Citizens and Journalists with YouTube Direct
Every day, people with video cameras are changing the ways we get our news. We see it during elections. We see it during earthquakes, fires and other natural disasters. We see it on our freeways, in our schools and in our public spaces. Almost any event that takes place today has a chance of being captured on camera. As YouTube has become a global platform for sharing the news, media organizations have been looking for a good way to connect directly with citizen reporters on our site so they can broadcast this footage and bring it to a larger audience.
Enlisting the Web in the Redestricting Wars
Redistricting isn’t sexy: it involves numbers and maps, it’s wonky, and just thinking about it makes voters go to sleep. Which is immensely helpful to the politicians redrawing the lines every few years, because they know that almost no one outside of hardcore politicos is actually paying attention.
But redistricting is where the rubber meets the road in politics, since setting district boundaries is all about power: who has it, who keeps it, and who has a chance to get it in the future. And as the state-level victors of 2010 redraw legislative and congressional districts across the country, they’ll also be establishing the boundaries of power in Congress and 50 different statehouses.
You(r)Tube: Now You Too Can Collaborate, Curate
Say you have in interest in having regular folks whip out their video cameras or cell phones and create wonderful video content for your organization, advocacy group, or news enterprise. There's a great deal of appeal (especially given news and non-profit budgets these days). Your most passionate supporters have a way of channeling their energy and creativity towards advancing your work, and you get free material to work with. Win-win! Alas, there are downsides. Lots of people, frankly, create a lot of junk. And when your fans upload their stuff to YouTube, it gets lost in a sea of tangential response videos and clips of cats doing admittedly hilarious, but off-topic, tricks and stunts.
Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Democratization of News Media
It's November 2009 and we're nearing the end of a decade. It's been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. The newspaper industry has been particularly affected by the Web. Over the past 10 years, news media has undergone a seachange akin to the invention of the printing press in 1440.
