Citizen journalism
By Stephanie Kinnear 01/11/2007
It's been a good couple of months for YouTube.com.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the Web site, it's a place where people can upload videos and share them with their friends and family or, if they so choose, the rest of the world — for free.
YouTube first made its name in the music world among lesser-known bands. It was a place where they could post their low-budget music videos and, with any luck, attract a bit of attention. It worked in a few instances. Case in point: nerdy rockers OK Go's now famous treadmill music video has been watched close to 2.5 million times on the site. (It's pretty great. You can see it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NINJQ5LRh-0.)
Then, early last month, Google bought the site from co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen for $1.65 billion. Google's rationale? It could sink plenty of money into its own video-sharing site, but YouTube would probably still be doing it better. So the best option was to buy.
Immediately following the announcement of the impending purchase, YouTube “broke” some of the biggest news stories of the month — almost as if to say to Google: Yes, indeed, you did make a wise investment.
On Nov. 15, a student at UCLA used his cell phone to capture video footage of another student being tasered by campus police in Powell Library. Although the Daily Bruin first ran the story, hundreds of thousands of people went to YouTube to see the video footage for themselves.
Days before that, YouTube ran footage of police officers in Hollywood kneeling on a suspect's neck and punching him repeatedly in the face after a foot chase, while the suspect continually complained that he couldn't breathe. (Check out PW reporter André Coleman's story “A recorded life” on the YouTube and Myspace phenomenon at http://www.pasadenaweekly.com/article.php?id=4124&IssueNum=50 .)
Then, of course, there was Michael Richards' racist tirade at a comedy club in Los Angeles.
Whether YouTube was the first to post these stories is almost beside the point. And the point is this: the age of citizen journalism is upon us. It didn't happen on Craigslist; it didn't really happen in the blogosphere. It's happening on YouTube, and it's being brought to you by cell phones.
We are entering a new era of citizen involvement. Think of it as a high-tech Neighborhood Watch. Kids with obscenely expensive cell phones are looking out for the little guy, and that's a good thing. Want to know who stole your car? Well, hopefully the neighbor's kid has already posted the whole thing on YouTube and sold it to the local news station.
It's an interesting and exciting time. Hopefully all this technology will keep the bad guys in check, whether the bad guys are the LAPD or the street gang that hangs out at the local park.
Of course, we sacrifice a bit of privacy for this new breed of journalism and this new level of security. Is the trade-off worth it? We'll soon find out.
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