The YouTube News Feed: What’s happening now?

Whether it’s an altercation between a Congressman and a student in Washington, D.C., violent attacks against ethnic minorities in Kyrgyzstan, or oil washing up on a beach in the Gulf Coast, videos uploaded to YouTube by both amateur reporters and professional journalists move through the media ecosystem with a sophistication and speed greater than ever before. But with 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, how can people more easily find the latest breaking news videos on our site? And how can media organizations better leverage this content to expand the scope of their reporting and keep us all better informed?

To develop answers to these questions, we’re testing something new this summer: the YouTube News Feed. We’ll be working with the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism to track news as it breaks on YouTube. The news feed will provide a stream of breaking news videos on YouTube, with a focus on strong visuals, non-traditional sources and the very latest uploads: videos like this natural gas well explosion in North Texas, this citizen’s election fraud investigation in New Jersey, this activist’s painful run-in with the sharp end of a fisherman’s hook in the Mediterranean sea, or even this run-away elephant in Zurich, Switzerland.

You’ll find the feed on CitizenTube, our news and politics blog at citizentube.com; you can also follow it via our twitter account, @citizentube. While we’ve occasionally tracked news videos on CitizenTube in the past (around the Iran election protests or the Los Angeles wildfires, for example), this summer you’ll see us increasing our focus significantly. Click here to see more.



You can help: if you’ve uploaded breaking news videos, please tweet them to us (@citizentube), and include as much context as you’re able to give. And we’d love to hear your feedback about this project in the comments sections of CitizenTube. Our goal with this news feed is to learn more about the news ecosystem on YouTube -- and who better to teach us than people like you.

Steve Grove, Head of News & Politics, recently watched “Abuse charges at running of the bulls”