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New Newsand took video on their mobile phone.For politicians, activists and nonprofits,posting a video is the 21stcentury press release that affords themfree media opportunities. News Websites can link to it and TV stationscan use it. Of course these videos—designed to promote the message ofthose who produce them—will notserve the public interest in the sameway that a news report would.Media organizations, in turn,post their content on YouTube in anattempt to gain new viewers, revenueand exposure. Like any other partneron YouTube, news organizations canuse our content identification andmanagement tools—Content ID—tofind and claim user videos (like themashups uploaded by clip-cutters).Then they can choose what they wantto happen next—they can block thevideo, leave it up and monitor it, oreven make money from it. Increasingly,news organizations are seeingthe value in leveraging this organicuser activity; the majority of mediacompanies using Content ID chooseto make money from user clips, ratherthan take them down.YouTube’s Tool ChestThere are some challenges to the You-Tube news ecosystem for consumersand for news organizations, particularlywhen it comes to news footage shotby citizen reporters. If it is taking toolong for the grass-roots community tosurface content, there are ways to findcontent faster, to verify its authenticity,or to request a particular video thatmight not already be on the site.Two of the most recent platformswe’ve built are:• YouTube Direct: Launched last fall,YouTube Direct is an open sourceplatform that enables news organizationsto request, review andrebroadcast news footage collectedon YouTube, right from their ownsite. The Washington Post, ITN,ABC News, Gannett, the TribuneCompany, The Huffington Post, andothers have used the platform atwww.youtube.com/direct to createSteve Grove moderated an interview with President Barack Obama that was streamed livefrom the White House earlier this year. YouTube users submitted questions by text andvideo and cast votes to determine which ones Obama was asked.their own citizen assignment desks.• Google Moderator: The votingplatform we used to collect citizens’questions for YouTube’s interviewwith President Barack Obama earlierthis year is now available to anyYouTube user. With a few clicks atwww.google.com/moderator, newsorganizations can create a dynamic,democratic discussion on any topic.Every day we explore more waysto enhance the news ecosystem onYouTube. This summer we’re running aYouTube News Lab with the Universityof California at Berkeley’s GraduateSchool of Journalism to find out evenmore. Working with three studentsand several local news partners, weare experimenting with a newsfeed ofcitizen-reported videos to help newsorganizations locate relevant content.And we’re working on a hyperlocal newspartnership in San Francisco with CBSaffiliate KPIX-TV to cover as muchof the city’s news as possible throughcitizen-reported videos. (Stay tunedto our news and political blog, www.citizentube.com, to find out more.)If there’s one thing we know aboutnews on YouTube, it’s that things happenquickly. Our users innovate at anextraordinary pace and in ways thatamaze us, make our world more transparent,and change the way we consumeinformation and are informed. Asnews organizations continue to evolveand develop new business models,YouTube will undoubtedly be a part oftheir strategy. With so much contentto explore, creative minds are nowseeking ways for us to find what wethink we’re looking for. It may feellike a jungle out there, but we findbetter ways to explore it every day. Steve Grove is the head of news andpolitics at YouTube. He developedthe CNN/YouTube debates and theYouTube Direct citizen reportingplatform. He tweets @grove andblogs at www.citizentube.com.Nieman Reports | Summer 2010 51