It’s 2 p.m. in Culver City, Calif. and The Young Turks’ (TYT) online broadcast is being filmed as producer Jayar Jackson talks on the phone from Current Studios.
“The reason I’m speaking so low is because I’m just in the background,” he says.
Every once in a while a loud, on-air laugh from Cenk Uygur, TYT’s visionary and co-host, punches through to the receiving line.
The Young Turks are in the midst of wrapping up the second hour of their main broadcast, TYT News.
Today, John Iadarola is filling in for Ana Kasparian, Uygur’s regular co-host. Iadarola is co-host of TYT University, a channel geared towards college and university students. In a matter of hours, the newscast awill be spliced and diced into tinier segments and uploaded onto their YouTube channel.
From there the public, including TYT News’ over 400,000 subscribers, can do what they want with the information.
YouTube has come a long way since it began in 2005, and The Young Turks have grown along with it, converting a news and entertainment radio show of the same name into a YouTube channel in 2006. Today, TYT has over 670 million video views, making it the largest online newscast in the world.
They are just one example of many alternative newscasts and commentary shows (SourceFed, PhilipDeFranco, WHATTHEBUCKSHOW) that are currently exploding on YouTube.
Not to mention contributing to the 72 hours of video being uploaded on the ‘Tube every minute.
Money talks
As the stakes get higher, YouTube is now being taken seriously by an overwhelming number of traditional news broadcasters as well. CNN, ABC, and CBC already have YouTube channels.
“Anything that attracts over $1 billion . . . from Google to buy it certainly is revolutionary and deserves notice,” Amy Eisman, a journalism director at American University in Washington, D.C. said.
Alfred Hermida, a University of British Columbia (UBC) journalism professor is currently writing a book about social media and the future of news.
He says the alternative to mainstream transition YouTube is currently going through is similar to what other new platforms have always done.
“They start off being anarchic, very Wild West. Then business comes in thinking of ways of providing services that can generate income,” he said.
Hermida compares the increasing privatization of YouTube to Facebook.
“You can see this happening with YouTube with big news organizations having YouTube channels.”
More entertainment than news?
Hermida said the key thing traditional broadcasters need to keep in mind is the reason why people go to YouTube for news is they want and expect a different experience than TV offers.
“Peter Mansbridge is very serious when he presents the news. On YouTube that might not work. You expect something a little more personal, a little more tongue-in-cheek. Still trying to be accurate, balanced, and fair, but a different style of presentation,” Hermida said.
Iadarola said in order for news on YouTube to do well, the hosts need to be entertaining.
“It’s much more personality-driven than other forms of media. People want us to tell them what we think about the news as much as what the news is,” he said.
Another problem with mainstream broadcasters is that they don’t understand they need to deliver information differently, Iadarola said.
“You can’t do an 18-minute story. It has to be fast and engaging and you have to get to the point very quickly. And I don’t know if most of these major media companies are good at doing that,” he said.
“This is a revolution that is . . . driven by consumers . . . not media companies. I mean it’s a nightmare for media companies,” Donna Logan, founder of UBC’s master’s of journalism program said.
“There’s no question that journalism is devolving more to opinion and entertainment. We’re being assaulted by so much information that it’s very, very hard to preserve high quality journalism,” she said, noting most time is spent delivering the news rather than collecting it.
This is one of the reasons Peter Angione, director of CTV News Ottawa said CTV doesn’t have a YouTube channel.
“I think it’s very dangerous for people to set up these channels and quasi-news organizations that don’t fact-check,” he said of The Young Turks.
Angione said he doesn’t think online channels such as TYT are as credible news sources as CTV because they don’t follow broadcasting standards. The main reason CTV isn’t on YouTube though is because they want people to go to the CTV website to watch videos, Angione said.
“At this point we don’t think it necessary,” he said. “Until people tell us we need to be on there, we won’t.”
Why not have both?
But Eisman said it’s not an either/or situation.
“The smart news companies moved quickly to embrace and partner [with YouTube], rather than fight or ignore,” she said.
In response to Angione’s comments, Iadarola said, “Sometimes getting some aspects of stories wrong, he’s almost certainly right. I would assume our error rate is probably higher than CNN or MSNBC. Considering their budget, they better get the facts better than we do.“
But, he points out the public shouldn’t solely trust either MSNBC or The Young Turks.
“We make it very clear, especially when covering stories that are outside our personal areas of expertise, that no one should be using us as a primary news source. They should be looking for secondary sources.”
This mixing and matching approach to news is exactly what Hermida said his research indicated is happening. Often what source the news came from becomes less important than the news itself, Eisman said.
“If someone has an amateur video that shares news — such as the video of Romney talking about the 47 per cent of voters, then once it’s verified as accurate, people don’t care where it comes from,” Eisman said.
A study released Oct. 17 by Ipsos Reid found that Canadian youth are much more likely to get their news regularly from multiple social media platforms than older generations are.
Logan said the research means young people don’t have the print habits that older generations do. Also, young people are naturally more comfortable using social media as they’ve grown up using the Internet.
Hermida said it’s the misunderstanding of social media that causes people to wave it off as not a credible source. As with anything, he said practice leads to a better grasp and easier navigation of this new world. Social media is not to be feared, he said. Rather, it’s simply another version of the old fashioned recommendation.
“We go back to what we’ve always done, which is ask our friends and family, what do I need to know today?” he said.
Hermida also points out that YouTube recommends videos for you too, based on your past views.
“So, it’s a combination of the human element and the system design,” he said.
There’s a chance that people feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of online news, but Eisman said it’s better than the alternative.
“I have to always fall on the side of more information is better than less. It makes for a more informed citizenry,” she said.
Logan said with our changing world, people want the news when they have time. Which is why they’re turning to social media.
“Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have missed the 10 o’clock CBC news for anything. If I was at a party, at a restaurant, I would rush home to watch it. That isn’t happening anymore, it’s just not,” she said.
Iadarola said the only reason TV has managed to survive this far is because it’s adapted to be more on demand by devices such as TVO and PVRs.
“I think that TV will linger on for quite a while to the extent that it’s able to mimic some of those advantages that YouTube naturally has,” he said.
For now, TV newscasts still remain the most popular platform in general, according to the Ipsos Reid study.
“TV in the short term has a reasonable future. Who knows in the long term? It is such a mind-boggling time, it’s very difficult to predict anything in the long term,” she said.
