YouTube Leveraging User Videos for Eyewitness News Reporting

YouTube's team understands the importance of user generated videos when it comes to covering and reporting cutting edge news. And since they are the most popular video platform it makes sense that they're embracing these eyewitness videos and taking the following major steps toward the goal of organizing and leveraging your videos to report the news.

...the most newsworthy eyewitness videos of the day, which have been verified by Storyful's team of editors and are embeddable from the original sources.

You can follow Newswire on Twitter or subscribe to their daily newsletter to follow the action.

The First Draft Coalition - This project brings together an impressive list of experts from Eyewitness Media Hub, Storyful, Bellingcat, First Look Media's Reported.ly, Meedan, Emergent, SAM Desk, and Verification Junkie. The mission behind this coalition reads like this:

You could say that user-generated news video is today’s “first draft” of capturing an event that took place. But when it comes to incorporating this content into the reporting of a news event, verification is a critical step for any newsroom -- and not every journalist knows where to start. So we’re bringing together a group of thought leaders and pioneers in social media journalism to create educational resources on how to verify eyewitness media, and how to consider the ethics of using it in news reporting.

The site will launch later this year, but you can follow them on Twitter to stay in touch with their progress.

The WITNESS Media Lab - YouTube partnered with WITNESS to present The WITNESS Media Lab and it's boldly taking on the mission to expose and fight human rights issues by analyzing eyewitness videos uploaded to YouTube. Their first project is set to leverage and explore "the impact of bystander v...