Barb Palser suggests, in an article for the American Journalism Review, that "news sites should make better use of the material provided by YouTube and other Internet resources".
Her main point is that news and media organisations don’t need to reinvent the wheel by trying to create their own flickr or youtube – they should, instead, figure out ways to use those and the other tools already available:
Even if news organizations can build or buy their own YouTube and Flickr-like tools, they shouldn’t assume that visitors, particularly the younger ones, will choose to share their personal media with a news site. YouTube and Flickr are appealing not only because they’re beautifully easy to use, but because they’re communal and agnostic. They also have more reach and recognition among the Web savvy than a typical news site. Rather than expecting people to submit their content to us, news organizations need to start going where the people are.
The whole idea of journalism is for journalists to go out – yes, go out – and find stories. What many journalists and their editors have yet to grasp is that, as the internet has become increasingly woven into our daily lives, the geographical areas, topics, and people we cover are being mapped and overlayed onto the internet. So if we want to find stories, we need to go out and look for people and their stories online, just as we need to get on the phone or walk down the street to find stories. That’s not to say that journalists and news organisations should gather all their material online, unless that’s where the story exists in it’s entirety, which would be rare, but rather we should use the internet as one of the places to find our stories. Palser seems to agree that going out online doesn’t necessarily mean the end of news organisations also gathering, where possible and relavent, their own content using their own editorial and technical systems. She says:
Of course news sites should continue their efforts to gather news images, video, information and insight directly from their audiences. But they should also incorporate the rich resources available on the Web. If a small local site doesn’t have the ability to accept viewer-submitted video on its own, why not leverage a site like YouTube to do the heavy lifting?
The chorus is growing.