Archive for the ‘YouTube’ tag
YouTube Offers Up Some ‘Citizen News’
A week ago, Ars Technica had a brief but interesting article on the meager unveiling of YouTube’s so-called ‘Citizen News Channel,’ a user-generated media project with aims of “…highlighting some of the best news content on YouTube.” They’ve got a well-spoken young woman named Olivia Ma serving as the ‘News Manager.’
The fresh-faced Ma, a Harvard grad, appeared slightly awkward but enthusiastic in her jump-off post. The two-minute ‘welcome’ video was very optimistic, as you might expect from a corporate launch, during which time she proclaimed, ever-so-bubbly:
“This stuff is awesome, you guys! And we want to see lots and lots of it. Because we believe that you YouTubers out there are changing the world of journalism.”
Hmm. Well. We’ll see.
To Olivia Ma’s great credit, Dan Gillmor, director of a the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and the esteemed author of We The Media: Grassroots Journalism By The People, For The People (which was released on a Creative Commons license, by the way), has given his hesitant approval of the project. Gillmore blogged his initial response to the online channel on the Center for Citizen Media website, stating:
So far so good — another worthwhile experiment in citizen media. I’m looking forward to seeing how it works… But as they monetize this, I hope they’re going to find a way to reward the people who are doing the work. As I’ve said again and again, I’m not a fan of business models that say “You do all the work and we’ll take all the money, thank you very much.”
I’m a little more skeptical of YouTube’s ‘Citizen News Channel’ than is Mr. Gillmor, though I will withhold judgement for the time being. But, and just to keep things in perspective, I do feel compelled to remind people that YouTube is owned by Google, a publicly traded multinational corporation and a global goliath in the tech industry.
As of late, Google seems to have strayed a bit from their much-publicized motto of ‘Do No Evil.’ The company has been called to task for participating in what some have identified as unethical, media-related human rights abuses in the ‘developing’ world. Many feel that Google, and other western tech and info firms, have given away their moral legitimacy in China, for example, in order to cash-in on growing economic markets overseas.
The NY Times Magazine had a fairly comprehensive article on Google in China. I don’t personally agree with the equivocation made between offenses of capital and that of the state, as presented by columnist Clive Thompson, but this text will give you a good start on what amounts to a very, very complex issue.
That being said, then, some folks are rightly concerned that media are increasingly controlled by fewer and fewer people and with damning consequences on the quality of news journalism. Ironically, one of those concerned citizens is Dan Gillmor himself. In this YouTube video via PBS (will the irony never end?!?), Gillmor hints at the web censorship taking place all around the world (00:01:48). Though he doesn’t connect the dots as clearly as I would like, it is readily apparent that wide-spread restrictions on internet use by foreign governments are enabled in large measure by western (i.e., American) corporations that seek only to earn money abroad. And Google is right in the middle of this global phenomenon.
For a more playful analysis, check out this animation entitled ‘iRepress’ from former journalist turned citizen animator, Mark Fiore.
So, in my mind at least, the potential in YouTube’s efforts to promote citizen journalism, incidentally or otherwise, is kinda behind the curve. I mean, in Web 2.0 terms, they’re really, really late to the party. There are currently many well-established, NON-profit alternatives in the field of participatory news media, and their reputations haven’t been called into question with the fervor of a gazillion pithy tech writers. Here’s a brief list of the citizen journalism websites I frequent:
The wisdom of the academics and media advocates notwithstanding, I guess I’d have to encourage people to avoid mainstream versions of citizen journalism. Start with what is already known to be truly humanitarian, not to mention supported by means outside the narrow agenda of capitalistic enterprise. Maybe Google (via YouTube) will make of a fool of me later on down the road. But for now, I will be holding the ‘Citizen News Channel’ at arms length.
