Slashdot Mirror
Google Launches YouTube Newswire To Verify Eyewitness Videos
An anonymous reader writes: YouTube has started a video news service to showcase the most interesting clips recorded and posted by eyewitnesses at events unfolding around the world. In partnership with the social news group Storyful, YouTube Newswire will be "a curated feed of the most newsworthy eyewitness videos of the day, which have been verified by Storyful's team of editors," a blog post said. Cnet reports: "In addition to the newswire, YouTube on Thursday announced two other projects that have to do with eyewitness journalism. One of the projects, called the First Draft Coalition, will serve as an educational resource for journalists — helping them to verify eyewitness videos and consider the ethics of using them in stories. The other is a partnership with the Witness Media Lab, focused on eyewitness videos having to do with human rights issues."
Officially vetted videos will become the only place most journalists will look, and a way to effectively help bury stories inconvenient to the establishment, under NSL so they can't tell us.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It will still be a human making a decision as to what is newsworthy and what is not. Crowd-vetting could be an option too?
How does this service deal with bias?
Let me give you an example of what I mean. There's a curated news web site known as SoylentNews. Its news is submitted by its readers. There is a team of editors who read over the submissions, and put selected ones onto the site's main page. It's like an amateurish version of /., if you can imagine that.
One huge problem there is that many of the submitted stories are riddled with very obvious bias. For instance, there are a number of frequent contributors with extremist viewpoints. The stories they submit generally reference primary news sources that are also very biased, without any attempt being made to remain as impartial as possible. Rather than informing readers of the facts, these submissions and the sources they reference have been specially crafted to push a specific agenda.
Now, one would expect the editors to do their jobs and to edit these truly bad submissions, but that typically does not happen. These biased submissions end up as front page news on that site, with the bias and agenda-pushing fully intact. I don't think it's necessarily true that the editors share the same bias. In my opinion, it's a combination of ignorance, laziness, and not having the guts to do things properly that allow the problems to continue.
So how will this YouTube service deal with the bias inherent to the users submitting the news content, and the editors who are responsible for curating the news? How will they combat users who intentionally submit tainted, biased news clips? How will they combat editors who can't or aren't willing to do their jobs properly?
Google has partnered with FOX NEWS?!?!? Holy Crap!
“We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?”
Good luck with that.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"Storyful" ? "Curated" ? Google has calculated this move specifically to piss off anyone with half a brain.
well dang, this is gonna get google banned in a few more countries that have human rights abuse issues and corrupt governments... with the possible exception of america, where google would fight tooth and nail to stop that happening. instead i suspect they'll work quite hard to twist what the definition of "verified editorial" is - most likely by deploying operatives within the team. this is gonna be fuun!
"Curated" is nothing more than "Censored"