On Sunday, a YouTube blog post introduced us to Olivia, YouTube's recently hired News Manager. She's going to be in charge of a new Channel on YouTube called Citizen News. This channel will highlight the best of the citizen journalism that's taking place on YouTube, but its ultimate goal is to become a go-to news destination on the web.
In February, CNN launched user-gen citizen news site i-Report, which was originally just a feature of the CNN web site. They also held two CNN-YouTube presidential debates over the summer. The new site, which looks and feels a lot like YouTube, offers many similar features like the ability to rate and discuss videos and embed them elsewhere.
But CNN is far from being the only large media outfit to launch citizen journalism ventures. For example, Yahoo and Reuters teamed up on You Witness News, BBC has Your News,and MSNBC has a section of their site that features citizen journalism, as well. MSNBC also owns citizen journalism site Newsvine, too.
Apparently, YouTube now wants to bring some of the focus on citizen journalism back to their site, where so many of today's citizen journalists post and share their work.
On the introductory post, Olivia writes (and posts a video of course - see below):
"Thanks to better, cheaper, and easier access to video equipment, there's an amazing amount of news being reported on YouTube every single day by citizens in all corners of the globe. You're conducting interviews with local community leaders, doing weekly reports on the latest campus news for your school television station, and investigating untold stories you think the world should know about. This stuff is fantastic, but we want to see more from you all and to bring more citizen journalists into the fold."
Even if you're not a citizen journalist yourself, but you just happen to stumble across some excellent citizen journalism on YouTube, she wants to know. She's also interested in knowing how YouTube can serve citizen journalists even better and she asked for all thoughts, questions, and other feedback to be sent to citizennews@youtube.com.
In the video below, Olivia introduces Citizen News and gives examples of the types of reporting they're looking for, which can include everything from university newscasts to citizen journalism straight out of Sudan:
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