Posts tagged User Generated Content

YouTube Wins News Innovation Award

Via VentureBeat:

YouTube won a News Innovation Award from the International Center for Journalists last night. Ironically, that’s just a day before the Israeli army used the service, along with Twitter and its own blog, to almost livecast the assassination of a Hamas leader.

YouTube has become a massive news destination, YouTube chief executive Salar Kamangar said in his acceptance speech, with 7000 hours of news-related footage uploaded every single day. Fully a third of searches on YouTube are news-related, and after the March earthquake in Japan this year, the top 20 YouTube videos of the disaster were watched almost 100 million times.

YouTube has always had amazing upload stats. For example, there are 23 or 32 or 45 minutes of video uploaded every minute.

But they just crossed a fun threshold, and created a fun site to announce this fun threshold: Every minute, one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube.

This lets us do fun 1:1 comparisons of minutes to hours and if you visit One Hour Per Second you get an animated HTML5 jamboree of the comparisons they make.

Images: Selected stills from YouTube’s One Hour Per Second Web site. Select any to embiggen.

H/T: Flowing Data.

We also spent a great deal of time analyzing how we utilize and deploy photojournalists across all of our locations in the U.S. […] We looked at the impact of user-generated content and social media, CNN iReporters and of course our affiliate contributions in breaking news. Consumer and pro-sumer technologies are simpler and more accessible. Small cameras are now high broadcast quality. More of this technology is inthe hands of more people. After completing this analysis, CNN determined that some photojournalists will be departing the company.

Jack Womack, CNN’s SVP of domestic news operations, in a memo to staff announcing 50 layoffs at the news organization. Among those fired were about a dozen photographers. 

Womack suggests that User Generated Content via iReport, and improving cameras used to capture images, made the photojournalists obsolete.