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Tag: storyful

  • YouTube Launches Newswire to Offer Verified Eyewitness Videos

    YouTube Launches Newswire to Offer Verified Eyewitness Videos

    We’ve seen the era of the “citizen journalist” expand as the tools at their disposal grow. If you have a camera and you’re in the right place at the right time, you can make history on YouTube. Now, YouTube is looking to bolster its position with “new initiatives to support the discovery and verification of eyewitness news video.”

    YouTube is partnering with social news agency Storyful to launch the YouTub Newswire, a “curated feed of 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.”

    The fact that anyone can upload a video to YouTube is both wonderful and potentially problematic. Over 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and separating the “noise” from the “news” is vital – according to Storyful.

    “We’ve always taken our commitments to YouTube, our newsroom clients and the uploaders we work with very seriously. Our mission has always been to mine the platform, sort the news from noise and find the stories worth telling. This, the YouTube Newswire, is the next step forward in that mission,” says Storyful Managing Editor Aine Kerr in a post.

    “While the platform has become noisier and more diverse, Storyful has gotten much more sophisticated in its technology, discovery, verification, acquisition and distribution of video. We’ve done extensive social sleuthing, worked with the likes of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times on UGC documentaries that had YouTube at their heart, debunked popular YouTube videos and amplified those videos at the heart of some of the biggest news stories of recent years.”

    Storyful says its expertise in weeding through the muck will help YouTube Newswire succeed.

    YouTube says it wants Newswire to be a tool for journalists.

    “With the Newswire, we hope to provide journalists with an invaluable resource to discover news video around major events, and to highlight eyewitness video that offers new perspectives on important news stories. The Newswire will feature global and regional feeds that surface the most relevant videos in different parts of the world.”

    The YouTube Newswire will also have a presence on Twitter and can be delivered via daily email newsletter. Right now on the Newswire, you can see videos about the Charleston Church shooting, flooding in Texas, and the new $10 bill.

    YouTube also announced two other projects focused on eyewitness news videos – the First Draft coalition and the Witness Media Lab.

    “We hope that these new projects will empower more journalists to use powerful eyewitness video easily and responsibly,” says Olivia Ma, Head of Strategy and Operations at the Google News Lab.

  • News Corp. Pays $25 Million For Social News Verification Agency Storyful

    News Corp. announced today that it has acquired social news agency Storyful for $25 million as a move to accelerate its “digital transformation” and video strategy.

    Storyful is known for verifying news from social media, or in other words pulling out the real stuff from a sea of noise and hoaxes. News Corp. says it will use its own resources to enhance Storyful’s products and services for newsrooms, advertising agencies and brands. It will also use Storyful to enhance its own publications.

    Storyful

    News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson said, “Storyful has become the village square for valuable video, using journalistic sensibility, integrity and creativity to find, authenticate and commercialise user-generated content. Through this acquisition, we can extend the village square across borders, languages and platforms.”

    “Video is a vocation for the new News, which will combine with Storyful to reach a growing global audience, enhancing our own editorial products and creating new content communities,” he said.

    Storyful CEO Mark Little added, “By joining forces with News Corp, Storyful can quickly transform its vision into a global reality. We believe that journalism in the age of social media needs to be open, innovative and collaborative, and so does the business model that will sustain it. News Corp is a natural fit for a company which wants to help reinvent the news industry.”

    News Corp. considers the acquisition a complement to its existing video offerings like WSJ Live and BallBall.

    Image: Storyful

  • YouTube, WITNESS, Storyful Partner for New Human Rights Channel

    YouTube has partnered up with WITNESS, an international organization that utilizes video for human rights advocacy, and Storyful, a social network of aggregated news, to create a powerful new outlet that offers the world a new venue to spotlight important stories related to human rights cases around the world. The product of this partnership is a new channel on YouTube simply called Human Rights that curates content about human rights in hopes of educating and prompting action.

    The site so far includes playlists that include multiple videos about particular subjects or regions, such as a series on Abdulhadi Al Khawaja, a human rights activist in Bahrain currently detained since last June during the government’s crackdown on pro-democracy protests. Interspersed among the numerous videos about Al Khawaja are brief info placards that introduce the proceeding video. In all, there’s nearly an hour’s worth of video about Al Khawaja’s plight.

    In all, there’s 35 playlists on the Human Rights channel that covers everything from the Occupy Wall Street protests to the deaths of journalists Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik in Syria to a profile on the human rights conditions of North Korea. The playlists juxtapose professional videos from established organizations like Amnesty International and PBS with very raw footage uploaded by YouTube users, as seen in the harrowing in-depth series about a Tibetan nun’s self-immolation to protest China’s occupation of the country.

    Anybody can suggest a video for inclusion in a playlist by emailing the YouTube URL as well as pertinent information about the video to [email protected]. Storyful will be checking up on the sources of the videos to make sure they’re the real deal while WITNESS will be moderating channels to make sure the content is calibrated to accurately and effectively inform audiences about the specific human rights issue depicted in the videos.

    [Via YouTube Blog.]