YouTube has long been the soil bed of many budding citizen journalism initiatives and now its taken steps to recognise and encourage the efforts of those users with the launch of a Citizen News channel. They have employed a news manager to locate and bring together citizen journalism efforts around YouTube and pull them into the news channel.

According to the YouTube blog:

Thanks to better, cheaper, and easier access to video equipment, there’s an amazing amount of news being reported on YouTube every single day by citizens in all corners of the globe. You’re conducting interviews with local community leaders, doing weekly reports on the latest campus news for your school television station, and investigating untold stories you think the world should know about. This stuff is fantastic, but we want to see more from you all and to bring more citizen journalists into the fold.

It will be interesting to see how the channel is used by people – I can’t imagine it being used as a news destination site because the breadth of news interest is just too wide and a lot of citizen journalism content is very localised (hence my decision to launch local norg sites). But, it’s definitely going to be an interesting showcase of how people are using online media to produce and distribute content. The possibilities are endless – at the very least it should help people recognise the potential that we all have to create, distribute and engage in news.

Here’s an introductory video from the YouTube news manager Olivia: