How Newsrooms and Journalists Can Best Utilize YouTube to be Engaging, Gain Credibility, and Build Trust

Written by Trever Bolton, Claire Petersen, Micah Roth, and Yordanos Tesfazion

A Brief History of YouTube

YouTube was founded on Feb. 14, 2005, by former Paypal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. Originally made for dating videos, the platform quickly switched over to allow any video to be published by any person. Quickly growing in popularity as a free video publishing service, Google purchased the company for $1.65 billion in 2006

Viral videos and internet personalities became an immediate draw to the site. From 2007 to 2012, YouTube was a preinstalled app on all new iPhones, thus expanding the user base. Advertising entered the site in 2007, allowing channels with over 1,000 subscribers to receive money from advertisements that played before their videos. By 2013, the site reached 1 billion user visitations per month.

YouTube has had many variations of a paid subscription service on the site to remove advertisements and make music and video streaming easier for its viewers. These services started with “Music Key” in 2014 and evolved into “YouTube Red” in 2015, which included the company making exclusive shows for the paid service. In 2018, the service was changed to “YouTube Premium.”

In recent years, YouTube has implemented new features such as stories similar to Snapchat and Instagram as well as an endless scrolling feed section similar to TikTok. In 2021, YouTube removed the dislike counter so viewers could not see how many dislikes a video received. Dislikes are currently only visible to the owners of a video.

How to Take Advantage of YouTube’s Homepage and Live Features

YouTube’s homepage function for channels provides users a way to organize their content in playlists, engage with their audience through the community page, and promote other channels they’re affiliated with on their channels page.

News outlets can organize their daily news content in dated weekly playlists that their audience can sift through. If a news outlet is working on a developing story, title a playlist with something broad enough that can serve as an umbrella for all updates related to that story. Avoid playlist titles that are too specific and can be only applied to a handful of videos.

A channel’s homepage includes a tab for the community page, which acts as a “wall” for the channel’s owners to post whatever they please. News outlets can best utilize this feature by posting news highlights each morning and checking up on their audience with polls.

Additionally, the channels tab can be used by news outlets to feature other YouTube channels they’re affiliated with or the channels of people/organizations that the outlet has covered in a past story.

YouTube’s live feature is incredibly underutilized by large news outlets on the platform. Instead of just having a 12–24 hour broadcast of the news, be creative! Have a live stream running in a backroom so journalists can give their audience a “behind-the-scenes” experience of what reporters do.

Utilize the live stream’s chat function and host a question and answers session with an expert who can speak on a topic that is covered in a news story that will be aired soon. Journalists who are reporting on the ground can also go live on YouTube on behalf of their news outlet and give their audience a unique perspective on a story while engaging with the chat.

How YouTube’s Live Feature is Already Used

YouTube has created a platform where users can become influencers through a longer form of media. Unlike many popular social media platforms, YouTube has the option to be a three-hour podcast, an in-depth 20-minute breakdown video, or a one-minute short.

YouTube, for many, is a platform where talented television personalities can use the platform for their creative endeavors bypassing the traditional TV networks. The YouTube channel “The Young Turks” plays to this medium by using the live feature, and they pump out live talk shows on a weekly basis, just like a TV network broadcast.

Sports journalist Pat McAfee also utilizes YouTube’s live feature, having a daily sports show himself. As a journalist who is known for his adult language and jokes, McAfee’s style of reporting deters him from being hired by many major TV sports networks. However, by utilizing YouTube’s live feature, he is able to continue having creative freedom while still making a living.

YouTubers have long taken advantage of their creative liberties on the platform, sometimes collecting millions of subscribers who love their content. These influencers are often left with an immense responsibility to tell the truth, rather than lead people on with misinformation. These are people with tremendous power with more freedom and no guidelines like TV networks. The impact they have on an audience begs questions of whether or not YouTube needs more guidelines on their platform, or if their freedom of speech is what makes the site’s special type of medium refreshing to those consuming content.

How News Organizations Can Use YouTube to Bridge Gaps and Build Trust

YouTube can fill the gap between time-sensitive reporting and covering the entirety of a story. One example currently is how climate change is covered in the news. When oil spills or historic changes in weather patterns occur, only the parts of the story that are ‘newsworthy’ are covered. This includes the current status of the event, such as when, where, and why it is happening, but the deeper background, the slower process of what led to the event is generally not covered.

Examining the past isn’t news, but it needs to be in order for the public to grasp the full story. YouTube is a place for slowing news down. Smaller, nonprofit networks, without the pressure of being controlled by larger for-profit corporations, have an even greater freedom to expand on topics and call for change when they see fit.

Another issue many have with news today is that it can be overwhelmingly negative. If news organizations utilized YouTube to share stories, they could take this into account and share what the viewer could do to support a cause, or provide pieces of hopeful, positive information connected to the story so they don’t feel abandoned upon receiving heavy information.

Traditional news rooms tend to follow a format of assigning a reporter a story, and then the reporter going out to extract the story from the public. YouTube allows for this process to be restructured. Citizens could have conversations with journalists where they bring up stories and topics that they have experienced, explaining what they see as news that matters to them/their personal experiences. These can be held and recorded over Zoom and then posted to YouTube. This format would help build trust in journalism by expanding the idea of who can be a journalist, and giving everyone a voice.

So What?

As social media platforms like YouTube are becoming crucial tools in spreading news to inform the masses, it is important to understand how to use them. YouTube offers numerous features that allow news channels to connect with their audience in a way that isn’t possible with satellite news, allows journalists to have more creative freedom without jeopardizing their credibility, and makes it easier for organizations to share news in a way that is transparent and trustworthy.

Take a look at YouTube’s roots. The reason why the platform is still so popular all these years later is because of how successful it is in helping people share information. If your newsroom, journalists, or organizations are not taking full advantage of what YouTube can do — get on it.