Pew Study Describes How YouTube is Becoming a Major News Source

  • A new 15-month study, conducted by the Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, shows that Internet users are increasingly accessing YouTube for news.
  • First-person, citizen-made videos depicting major events such as natural disasters and political upheaval are helping to drive the trend.
  • “The data reveal that a complex, symbiotic relationship has developed between citizens and news organizations on YouTube, a relationship that comes close to the continuous journalistic ‘dialogue’ many observers predicted would become the new journalism online,” writes Pew in the report.
  • “Citizens are creating their own videos about news and posting them,” the report continues. “They are also actively sharing news videos produced by journalism professionals. And news organizations are taking advantage of citizen content and incorporating it into their journalism. Consumers, in turn, seem to be embracing the interplay in what they watch and share, creating a new kind of television news.”
  • Additional key findings include: “Unedited video is becoming an increasingly popular way to view events, with such video making up 42 percent of the news watched on YouTube” and “Short videos —about two minutes in length —are the most popular, but they are not the only clips that do well. Thirty three percent of videos analyzed were between two and five minutes. And 18 percent were five minutes long or greater.”

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