YouTube Takes Another Shot at Journalism

Posted by Internet Guru

September 10, 2008

YouTube has announced a contest for aspiring documentarians and journalists to take home $10,000 for creating a series of journalistic pieces to go towards beefing up their “reporter” content selection. This isn’t the first thing they’ve done to emphasize their efforts to grow this sector of the service. A quick catalog of the recent posts to the YouTube company blog shows that almost exactly half of the last 20 posts concern something to do with citizen journalism on YouTube.

They’re definitely making a valiant effort to appear pro-journalism and pro-citizen reporting. Everyone knows this is something that’s desperately needed for the site. The above chart is from an incredibly even-handed article from PCMech entitled “Its Official, YouTube Sucks,” and shows the general distribution of content types by category on the sharing site. The question remains, though: are their journalism programs and contests good first steps or are they completely misguided window dressing?

I’ve got a feeling it’s the latter, and I sat down to analyze this, one of the more serious moves to encourage journalism on the site, to gain some insight as to what they’re thinking. They announced it earlier Tuesday on the YouTube blog: Read more on Mashable….

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