Google Announces YouTube Newswire to Sift the Wheat from the Chaff

YouTube is full of chaff. Full of it. Don’t believe me? Look here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here.

Much of that chaff comes in the form of ad hoc first-person video journalism. There is tremendous value in curating legitimate user-generated content, but with over 5 million hours spent every day on YouTube watching news, it becomes increasingly difficult to verify the legitimacy of a source. We often see more hoaxes than we do legitimate content. Thanks for that, Jimmy Kimmel.

To counter the threat of pervasive nonsense on YouTube, Google has just announced YouTube Newswire, a curated, verified channel of eyewitness news videos. Mountain View is partnering with News Corp subsidiary Storyful, a startup focused on providing accurate “stories worth telling” from social content. Based on that Mantra, ducks taking a bath with a capybara qualifies as a story worth telling on their own website.

Google forged a relationship with Storyful back in 2011 during the Tahrir Square protests in Cairo, and Storyful’s team of editors will be responsible for sifting through videos and embedding them from their original source (rather than ripping someone else’s YouTube video and reposting it, as is commonplace).

In addition, Google is forming the First Draft Coalition, which is an educational outlet staffed by various movers and shakers from social media journalism charged with teaching best practices to aspirant documentarians and video journalists.

Lastly, Google announced a partnership with the Witness Lab, which will ” produce a series of in-depth projects that focus on human rights struggles as seen from the perspective of those who live, witness, and experience them.”

All in all, you’ll still have all the cyst-popping videos you can handle, but Google is attempting to bring a little bit of order to the lawless wilderness known as YouTube, and when it comes to verifying the veracity of sources when discussing the important issues of the day, we’ll be the better for it.

Source: Google

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