As speculated a few weeks ago, YouTube announced today a citizen journalism partnership with KGO-TV — the first-ever partnership with a local TV station. In essence, it’s a new application of YouTube Direct, which gives publishers the ability to use YouTube to power video uploads. Called ABC7 uReport, it integrates a map with YouTube videos spanning breaking news, events, weather and Bay Area scenes.
“This is a project that aims to cover the San Francisco Bay Area as comprehensively as possible using citizen reported news, videos and photos,” said YouTube News Manager Olivia Ma. “All Bay Area residents are invited to participate in the project by documenting the news and events happening around them.” YouTube is helping seed the effort by reaching out to active users and bloggers in the area, and of course, TV promotion doesn’t hurt, either. As you might imagine, KGO-TV plans to air the best video on TV.
Today’s announcement comes soon after the launch of CitizenTube, a video blog of citizen journalism clips curated by the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Although YouTube doesn’t come out and say it, clearly the KGO partnership is an experiment that, if successful, will be pitched to TV stations across the country. With that kind of focused distribution, YouTube would have no shortage of local news video, which it’s already experimenting with geolocation and “news near you.”