gRovE | youTuBE: THE FlATTEning oF PoliTiCS 189three videos to youTube every day. And thousands of advocacy groups
and nonprofit organizations use youTube to get their election messages
into the conversation. For us, the most exciting aspect is that ordinary
people continue to use youTube to distribute their own political con-
tent; these range from “gotcha” videos they’ve taken at campaign rallies
to questions for the candidates, from homemade political commercials
to video mash-ups of mainstream media coverage.
What this means is that average citizens are able to fuel a new meri-
tocracy for political coverage, one unburdened by the gatekeeping
“middleman.” Another way of putting it is that youTube is now the
world’s largest town hall for political discussion, where voters connect
with candidates — and the news media — in ways that were never before
possible.
In this new media environment, politics is no longer bound by tradi-
tional barriers of time and space. It doesn’t matter what time it is, or where
someone is located — as long as they have the means to connect through
the Web, they can engage in the discussion. This was highlighted in a
pair of presidential debates we produced with CNN during this election
cycle during which voters asked questions of the candidates via youTube
videos they’d submitted online. In many ways, those events simply brought
to the attention of a wider audience the sort of exchanges that take place on
youTube all the time....News Organizations and youTube
Just because candidates and voters find all sorts of ways to connect
directly on youTube does not mean there isn’t room for the mainstream
media, too. In fact, many news organizations have launched youTube
channels, including the Associated Press, the New York Times, the BBC,
CBS, and the Wall Street Journal.
Why would a mainstream media company upload their news content
to youTube?
Simply put, it’s where eyeballs are going. research from the Pew
Internet & American Life project found that 37 percent of adult Inter-
net users have watched online video news, and well over half of online
adults have used the Internet to watch video of any kind. each day on
youTube hundreds of millions of videos are viewed at the same time
that television viewership is decreasing in many markets. If a main-
stream news organization wants its political reporting seen, youTube
offers visibility without a cost. The ones that have been doing this for
a while rely on a strategy of building audiences on youTube and then
trying to drive viewers back to their Web sites for a deeper dive into the
content. And these organizations can earn revenue as well by running
ads against their video content on youTube.345671
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