„But YouTube’s reach in the journalism world extends beyond broadcast television, especially as more media organizations outside of television focus on video production. As far as YouTube is concerned, any format of news — be it breaking, spot, investigative, live, long-form documentary, etc. — can work on the site. »The beauty of YouTube is that it makes all of those things possible,« YouTube’s head of news and education, Tom Sly, told me. »A week or two ago, during the Colorado wildfires, one of the local stations was livestreaming coverage of the wildfire on their YouTube channel…Then there’s the produced pieces that people are creating for YouTube — and for other broadcast formats that make their way onto YouTube — the video on-demand component. There’s also this area of what I would call eye-witness reporting, when someone who happens to be in the right or wrong place gets raw footage. When you put all of these things together, we have a really powerful platform.«
But what’s possible all in one place isn’t always the same thing as what works best. News organizations are still trying to figure out what consumers want in order to find the balance.
Yes, in an ever-expanding universe of cats, Drunk History, and nostalgia for old commercials, people really are turning to YouTube for some news and information — mostly in search of stories with dramatic visuals.
Five times in the past 15 months, the most searched term of the month on YouTube was related to a news event, according to Pew. The most popular news videos were related to the devastating earthquake-triggered tsunami that hit Japan last year. Sly says the site reliably sees big spikes in traffic after such global news events. (That tsunami also demonstrates how YouTube has changed the way journalists operate. I was a reporter for Honolulu Civil Beat when the March 2011 tsunami hit Japan, and at least one staffer’s sole job during our overnight breaking news coverage was to find and post YouTube videos to the Civil Beat live blog.)”