This morning, Google’s YouTube opened up its Reporters’ Center – a new hub for teaching citizen journalists to become better reporters by teaching them about how to prepare for interviews, be better investigative reporters, and how to help media organizations in the news-gathering process. Interestingly, at the same time as YouTube is trying to help citizen journalists, Google is also encouraging professional media organizations to join the YouTube Partner Program and upload more videos to YouTube that can then be featured on Google News.
Google argues that by joining this program, news organizations will be able to reach a wider audience, cut hosting costs, and be able to interact with YouTube’s large (and often highly vocal) user base.
Playing Both Sides
It is interesting to see how Google and YouTube are courting both ‘amateur’ reporters (in the best sense of the word) and large media organizations at the same time. Google is clearly looking to strengthen YouTube’s position as a hub for news content – and given how the news market is in flux today, it is smartly trying to encourage both pros and citizen journalists to use its site as their default repository for their video content. The core reason for Google to encourage citizen journalists to shoot better and more compelling video, and for courting bigger media organizations, however, is that it is simply easier to sell advertising against professionally produced content.
Of course, as PaidContent pointed out earlier this morning, news organizations and Google News don’t exactly have the most friendly relationship. Now that Google News features YouTube videos more prominently on the site, news organizations could potentially profit from this arrangement even though many larger organizations already use white-label video services and sell their own ads against their video content.
Good Content
Looking at the Reporters’ Center, by the way, it is nice to see that the quality of the content there is generally very high, and any aspiring journalist can learn quite a lot from the videos that are currently posted on the site.
