Posts tagged youtube

Media Criticism

Via Adam Schweigert.

YouTube Launches Human Rights Channel

Via the YouTube blog:

Activists around the world use YouTube to document causes they care about and make them known to the world. In the case of human rights, video plays a particularly important role in illuminating what occurs when governments and individuals in power abuse their positions. We’ve seen this play out on a global stage during the Arab Spring, for example: during the height of the activity, 100,000 videos were uploaded from Egypt, a 70% increase on the preceding three months. And we’ve seen it play out in specific, local cases with issues like police brutality, discrimination, elder abuse, gender-based violence, socio-economic justice, access to basic resources, and bullying.

That’s why our non-profit partner WITNESS, a global leader in the use of video for human rights, and Storyful, a social newsgathering operation, are joining forces to launch a new Human Rights channel on YouTube, dedicated to curating hours of raw citizen-video documenting human rights stories that are uploaded daily and distributing that to audiences hungry to learn and take action. The channel, which will also feature content from a slate of human rights organizations already sharing their work on YouTube, aims to shed light on and contextualize under-reported stories, to record otherwise undocumented abuses, and to amplify previously unheard voices. The project was announced today at the Internet at Liberty conference, and will live at youtube.com/humanrights. Storyful will source and verify the videos, and WITNESS will ensure the channel features a balanced breadth of issues with the context viewers need to understand the rights issue involved.

We hope this project can not only be a catalyst to awareness, but offer people new avenues for action and impact. The channel is committed to providing new citizen creators as well as viewers with the tools and information necessary so that every citizen can become a more effective human rights defender. It will also be available on Google+, where the broader human rights community can take part in discussions, share material, and find collaborators.

Image: Screenshot the Human Rights YouTube channel.

The Center for Investigative Reporting makes color book journalism for kids

There’s been a lot of talk lately about making journalism for different groups of people. Or at least that’s what I overhear. And that’s just what California Watch, a project of CIR, is doing:

It all started with an off-the-wall idea in an editorial meeting. While California Watch articles are written for adults, we recognize that oftentimes children are those most affected by the stories we report.

That’s exactly the case when it comes to our series on seismic safety oversight in the state’s K–12 schools. Thousands of children attend class each day in buildings or schools that have not received final safety certifications from the state’s chief building regulator. Some schools are located close to fault lines or within liquefaction zones.

The article talks a lot about the need for peripheral-reporting, or aiming stories at groups who aren’t, for whatever reason, reading or listening:

One Chinese school director called the books “urgently needed”; a Vietnamese reader said this would be the first time her mother had access to preparedness materials in a language she could understand.

The coloring book is the furthest along of a few ideas that CIR is working on. Another, due to launch this summer, is a YouTube channel that will curate investigative reporting video from the professional journalism world and, very importantly, the unnoticed-but-deserving clan of people who do it but aren’t “professional” yet.

In 2011, 1 Trillion Videos Were Watched on YouTube.

That’s a lot of kittehs.

Or, as the YouTube Blog calculates it, about 140 views for every person on earth.

The blog has top 10 lists and the details.