Google’s YouTube has teamed up with the Pulitzer Center to produce Project:Report – a project to inspire citizen journalists to create their own video news series and bolster YouTube’s journalism section.
YouTube is offering prizes of Sony VAIO schwag and a cash grand prize of $10,000 for the best submissions.
Sounds great, right? Maybe not.
Such a paltry prize may in fact disgruntle many of the Project:Report entrants who produce great documentary series and receive nothing in return, Mashable writes.
After pausing to think about it, I think Mashable is right. What do all those people who produce those great documentaries get in the end if they don’t win the grand prize or at least a new laptop? Some might get YouTube fame, but they probably won’t get much accolades for it in RL (real life :) ). And those in their local towns probably will never see the documentaries they produce.
And isn’t that what citizen journalists want? To be heard? To be acknowledged?
This presents an excellent opportunity for local news sites to piggyback off any momentum created by Project:Report.
YouTube is an excellent repository of video and can act as a database of local citizen news if stories are tagged correctly.
I’ve often encouraged newspapers to post interesting videos created by people within its coverage community. But Project:Report brings the opportunity to take that notion to a larger scale and actually instruct the everyone and their mother with a camera demographic in local communities to produce news pieces for use on the web.
And while news websites can’t all offer $10,000 grand prizes or even a one-year subscription to the print newspaper for producing great content, local news sites can provide exposure and acknowledgement. They can provide local celebrityism!
By promoting Project:Report, local news sites can not only solicit free content they can use on their website, but site producers can also uncover local talent that they may be able to call on for producing a series for the site.
What do you think? Worth a try?
{ 3 trackbacks }
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
typo in first link sir
Thanks Jeff!
I agree with the premise that documentary multimedia producers want their stories seen and want to be compensated adequately. Which is why I’m puzzled that the focus of most commentary about video journalism seems to revolve around YouTube, which claims ownership of your content in its TOS. There are a number of other less-well known video platforms, like Blip.TV, that don’t make an IP grab for everything you post. This leaves open the opportunity to profit if someone licenses your content. The only one who profits when you post to YouTube is YouTube. Why don’t more content producers care about that?
Strongly agree. Content producers should probably just host it themselves for total control. Take these three ingredients:
dreamhost.com +
http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/jw-flv-player/ +
ffmpeg to encode to H.264 =
your own private HD YouTube, that a content producer can have complete control over.
~Jeff
Jeff’s right. But help me out with the jw-flv-player, which has some confusing license conditions. It appears you can use it on your site if you are noncommercial, but you have to buy a license for each commercial video you want to use it for, or you can buy a really expensive ($395 or more?) blanket license.
Wouldn’t it be simpler to buy a Blip.TV pro account and let Blip distribute across multiple video platforms for you while protecting your license for the material?
Maybe. Probably. I’m a total control freak.
But that was probably a poor example. Try some of these, perhaps, or just use Flash’s video player:
http://www.beedigital.net/blog/free-flash-applications/
Thanks, Jeff. I’m a control freak too, but just a little less willing to reinvent wheels that seem to work reasonably well. But I do agree with your philosophy of control!
My question would be — what happens when blip.tv folds? Because, it will. That is why I’m against reliance on third party tools in general.
Yep, very valid concern. (Hope they don’t.) I was very surprised when Brightcove killed its UGC platform. The pricing they are using for the professional is ridiculously high, probably only want to deal with Hollywood and the TV nets.
This is going to be a tough year for businesses that have “???” as step 2 of their business plan. I expect to see a lot of second tier web 2.0 businesses fail.