NEW YORK — A new study has found that YouTube has become a major platform for news, one where viewers are turning for eyewitness videos in times of major events and natural disasters.
The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism on Monday released its examination of 15 months of the most popular news videos on the Google Inc.-owned site. It found that while viewership for TV news outpaces those consuming news on YouTube, the video-sharing site is a growing digital environment.
“There’s a new form of video journalism on this platform,” said Amy Mitchell, deputy director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. “It’s a form in which the relationship between news organizations and citizens is more dynamic and more multiverse than we’ve seen in most other platforms before.”
More than a third of the most-watched videos came from citizens. More than half came from news organizations, but footage in those videos sometimes incorporated footage shot by YouTube users.
