With YouTube Direct, Everyone Makes the News

If you've looked at YouTube lately, you'll know that people are out there making videos like there's no tomorrow. Apparently there's nothing people love more than training their cameras on some unsuspecting subject and then sharing the result with the world.

Some of them even rise above the stupid animal tricks to bring viewers how-to instructions, consumer critiques and breaking news. This spirit of serious video work is what YouTube is hoping to capitalize on with its new YouTube Direct program, which will connect such "citizen journalists" with actual TV and Web news editors, according to Reuters. The editors, in fact, can even put out a call for such footage from amateurs who'd like to get on the air.

The Huffington Post, NPR, Politico, the San Francisco Chronicle and two Boston TV stations are currently testing the system. So will these citizen journalists get paid for their work? Unfortunately not.

"It's an incentive to upload great video, because of the recognition you'll get from legitimate news organizations," Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube, told Reuters. So these aspiring filmmakers will work for free, even if the news network called for the footage? That hardly seems fair, but this is a brave, new world, and that's an issue for another day.

Photo courtesy of jonsson, via Flickr