Sometimes a cell phone that can record video is all you need to do citizen journalism:
When YouTube launched CitizenTube in 2008, it marked Google’s support of citizen journalism and crowdsourcing via video. Now that it’s the second biggest search engine (after its parent) and users are turning to it for news and information, YouTube is shifting CitizenTube from a citizen portal to a news source, mixing amateur and professional video clips.
Any user can upload news footage and flag it for inclusion on Twitter (by alerting @citizentube), as Steve Grove, YouTube’s head of news and politics, notes on the site’s blog.
Grove also writes, in an article titled “YouTube’s Ecosystem for News,” that “Our users innovate at an extraordinary pace and in ways that amaze us, make our world more transparent, and change the way we consume information and are informed.”
