UC Berkeley journalism students are already running all around the Bay Area, notepads in hand, digging up stories for a number of local news sites.
In a partnership just announced by YouTube, the students now will also be recording video of news events that will be uploaded to CitizenTube, a new news site.
YouTube will also be funneling other breaking news video to the site, by both professional and citizen journalists. The idea is to locate all news videos in one stop so people don’t have to wade through all the films on YouTube.
So far, the videos on CitizenTube are an interesting mix: a brief shot of a statue of Jesus on fire, a video of a Seattle police officer hitting a teenage girl in the face, Uzbecks fleeing the ethnic violence in their country, and more.
There was no one at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism who was available to explain the new partnership. (School is out for summer)
Here’s what the YouTube blog said:
“Whether it’s an altercation between a Congressman and a student in Washington, D.C., violent attacks against ethnic minorities in Kyrgyzstan, or oil washing up on a beach in the Gulf Coast, videos uploaded to YouTube by both amateur reporters and professional journalists move through the media ecosystem with a sophistication and speed greater than ever before. But with 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, how can people more easily find the latest breaking news videos on our site? And how can media organizations better leverage this content to expand the scope of their reporting and keep us all better informed?
To develop answers to these questions, we’re testing something new this summer: the YouTube News Feed. We’ll be working with the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism to track news as it breaks on YouTube. The news feed will provide a stream of breaking news videos on YouTube, with a focus on strong visuals, non-traditional sources and the very latest uploads: videos like this natural gas well explosion in North Texas, this citizen’s election fraud investigation in New Jersey, this activist’s painful run-in with the sharp end of a fisherman’s hook in the Mediterranean sea, or even this run-away elephant in Zurich, Switzerland.”
