It's no secret that the news business is going through a rough transition.
New media is changing the landscape, but that doesn't mean that news is dead. People still want to find out what's going on in their city, country, and the world.
The folks at Google believe that traditional news organizations don't have a demand problem, but a business-model problem. They apparently started a secret YouTube experiment with local media. It's a citizen journalism project that took off in San Fransisco and supposedly will go to other major cities pretty soon. The company sent emails to a select group of local bloggers and digital journalists to report on local news. One of the emails said: "For the months of July and August, YouTube is going local in San Francisco to encourage citizen videographers -- anyone with a video-capable phone or camera, really, -- to help cover San Francisco's news, issues and events and we want local news sites to join us." Apparently, it's an experiment to showcase Google's YouTube Direct tool.
Peter Kafka writes in his MediaMemo: "YouTube Direct is supposed to help publishers gather and distribute video from amateur contributors, essentially by plugging YouTube into their sites. The program has had a bit of a success when big media organizations like NPR or ABC’s “Good Morning America” have used it.
But local news outlets, which could theoretically really use help from both YouTube and their own readers/watchers, haven’t done much with it. So the idea is to use the San Francisco version as a showcase, and YouTube staffers are trying to pre-seed the effort by rounding up local contributors." Google is expected to announce more on the matter soon.
New media is changing the landscape, but that doesn't mean that news is dead. People still want to find out what's going on in their city, country, and the world.
The folks at Google believe that traditional news organizations don't have a demand problem, but a business-model problem. They apparently started a secret YouTube experiment with local media. It's a citizen journalism project that took off in San Fransisco and supposedly will go to other major cities pretty soon. The company sent emails to a select group of local bloggers and digital journalists to report on local news. One of the emails said: "For the months of July and August, YouTube is going local in San Francisco to encourage citizen videographers -- anyone with a video-capable phone or camera, really, -- to help cover San Francisco's news, issues and events and we want local news sites to join us." Apparently, it's an experiment to showcase Google's YouTube Direct tool.
Peter Kafka writes in his MediaMemo: "YouTube Direct is supposed to help publishers gather and distribute video from amateur contributors, essentially by plugging YouTube into their sites. The program has had a bit of a success when big media organizations like NPR or ABC’s “Good Morning America” have used it.
But local news outlets, which could theoretically really use help from both YouTube and their own readers/watchers, haven’t done much with it. So the idea is to use the San Francisco version as a showcase, and YouTube staffers are trying to pre-seed the effort by rounding up local contributors." Google is expected to announce more on the matter soon.
