Youtube Direct: Bringing news organisations and citizen journos together

The Guardian’s PDA blog this morning has described how a new service from Youtube has created a link between news organisations and citizen journalists.

According to the blog, Youtube Direct allows news and media organisations to request, review and rebroadcast clips directly from Youtube users.

It also stated how, following the established use of camera phone footage and PCs, this is the next step in an important part of the future of local news, which partly relies on the contributions of what it calls engaged citizens.

YouTube's head of news and politics, Steve Grove, told the Guardian: "People around the world are taking up cameras and covering news in ways big and small - from documenting global events, to filming local town halls in neighborhoods. YouTube Direct empowers news and media organisations to easily connect with these citizen reporters, and use the power of our platform to cover the news better than ever before."

The move by the Google-owned service has been embraced in the US, with it being beta-tested by the Huffington Post. They used the feature that allows users to upload a video to YouTube directly whilst staying on the news site.

The Post is currently using the tool in a competition to find a citizen journalist to cover the Climate Conference in Copenhagen. National Public Radio and the San Francisco Chronicle are also planning to use the service.

One hope is that the deeper interaction between users and news organisations will make the task of verifying the content and its source much easier.

Said Grove: "As we are trying to meet a need that news organisations have, we created an ecosystem between the news audience and YouTube. Think of it like this: YouTube Direct is like a loop between a news website and YouTube. It wraps up YouTube's upload site in a box and places it on the site of news organisations."

The Guardian described how this open-source application lets media organisations use customised versions of YouTube's upload platform on their own websites.

In addition, it said, the tool offers a virtual assignment desk in which news and media organisations can ask YouTube users to submit breaking news videos, user-generated reports, or reactions to questions or news events of the day.