Since mobile devices and video-sharing websites -- which gives people the ability to shoot videos from their phones and upload them online -- are changing the way people consume news and how it's being reported, Google wants to make it easier for the media to trustworthy eyewitness videos , CNET reported.
Storyful, a division of News Corp, and Google News Lab teamed up to launch YouTube Newswire, a hub for discovering, verifying and publishing the most newsworthy eyewitness videos of the day. The channel will gather and verify videos from major events so news outlets can share them.
"The role of the eyewitness has never had a more vital place in the newsgathering process," Olivia Ma, head of the News Lab at Google, said in a blog post Thursday. "It's almost impossible to turn on the news during a breaking event without seeing raw video uploaded by a YouTube user somewhere across the globe."
Storyful has a team of journalists and editors at its social news agency that will "work to verify footage" uploaded to the YouTube newswire, The Verge reported.
The newswire will give journalists an indispensable resource to discover eyewitness video and highlight YouTube videos that offers new perspectives on important news stories. The channel will also feature global and regional feeds that surface the most relevant videos in different parts of the world, covering News, Weather and Politics on YouTube.
Google has worked Storyful on this project since 2011 when protests broke out in Tahrir Square, Ma noted. The objective of the channel has always been to discover, verify and distribute the most relevant, real-time and compelling videos uploaded to the platform.
We live in a world where anyone can bear witness to what is happening around them and share it with a global audience, and YouTube has become a primary home for this powerful, first-person documentary footage," Ma said.
YouTube Newswire can be accessed via youtube.com/newswire.
