YouTube Is Testing a News Feed

YouTube may not be replacing your television anytime soon, but it is slowly evolving towards that. One area on which YouTube is focusing is news content or, rather, citizen journalism. The nature of the site makes it ideal for someone with footage from a developing story or even people venturing out and making their own investigations. There have been plenty of videos that landed on YouTube and that were then picked up by the world’s media.

But these have been just independent occurrences, until now, there hasn’t been much effort put in creating a central place for news on YouTube. That is changing, though, and YouTube is launching a dedicated news feed powered solely by videos from the site.

“We’re testing something new this summer: the YouTube News Feed. We’ll be working with the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism to track news as it breaks on YouTube. The news feed will provide a stream of breaking news videos on YouTube, with a focus on strong visuals, non-traditional sources and the very latest uploads,” Steve Grove, head of News & Politics at YouTube, wrote.

“While we’ve occasionally tracked news videos on CitizenTube in the past (around the Iran election protests or the Los Angeles wildfires, for example), this summer you’ll see us increasing our focus significantly,” he explained.

The news feed is now available over at citizentube.com, the YouTube channel / blog that the site used in the past to highlight important events. The idea is to feature several videos coming from regular users every day while also providing context and a back story, when possible.

The project is still pretty much an experiment as, frankly, no one has done this before. However, with people curating the videos and a dedicated place for all the news-worthy ones to be included, all that remains to be seen is whether YouTube users can prove to be a reliable source of quality material.