That’s the way it is - on YouTube’s Citizen News channel
Posted May 23, 2008 at 07:46 AM by Renay San Miguel
Section: Video, Gadgets / Other, Lifestyle, Web, Online Music/Video
Local television stations are shedding highly-paid, experienced journalists; the evening newscasts on broadcast networks keep on losing viewers; cable news continues erasing the line separating news and loud, crass opinion.
Such is the state of television journalism in 2008.
It’s all old news in the news business: digitally-empowered consumers choosing to customize their news, technology lowering the barriers of entry for those who want to call themselves journalists. YouTube’s new Citizen News channel will give more ammunition to those who claim traditional media is dying. The top website for user-generated video now wants to aggregate all its amateur news video and reporting onto one location, with a news manager, Olivia, supposedly vetting the content. “You YouTubers out there are changing the world of journalism,” she says in the channel’s opening video. “You’re using your voices not only to report the news as you see it, but to engage and dialogue with one another, to tell stories that might not otherwise be heard.”
Yet as with most technological developments, there’s already been attempted co-opting of the citizen journalist label by traditional media; witness CNN’s i-Reports, Fox News’ U-Reports, the eerie cell phone videos and photos from the 2005 London terrorist attacks on the BBC. Look on the left side of YouTube’s Citizen News page; there among the subscribers are the Wall Street Journal’s Digital Network and “Texas Country Reporter” Bob Phillips’ lifestyle features that run on stations throughout the Lone Star State. Hardly amateur productions using webcams - if not shaky-cams - and audio that sounds like it was recorded in a closet. Also, in the “favorites” section is a story from Rocketboom, the citizen journalist site that rocketed Amanda Congdon to short-lived traditional media fame two years ago.
Read [Digital Inspiration]