YouTube to roll out new service to feature on-the-ground videos about current events

On Thursday, YouTube announced plans for a YouTube Newswire to feature eyewitness videos of the most newsworthy happenings around the world. These include events such as the Arab Spring uprisings and protests in Ferguson, Missouri.

The YouTube Newswire is being created in collaboration with the social news group Storyful. The new service will be a curated feed of videos mostly related to social justice and human rights.

According to a blog post from the Google-owned video sharing service,"With the Newswire, we hope to provide journalists with an invaluable resource to discover news video around major events, and to highlight eyewitness video that offers new perspectives on important news stories".

The initiative will draw on user-contributed videos on YouTube. Google News Lab's Olivia Ma said that it's almost impossible to turn on the news during a breaking event without seeing raw video uploaded by a YouTube user somewhere across the globe.

YouTube also announced that it was launching a team to work on verification of videos contributed to the platform called The First Draft Coalition. The platform will include experts from Eyewitness Media Hub, Storyful, Bellingcat, First Look Media and others.

They will develop and program a new site for verification and ethics training, tools, research, and, most importantly, case studies around the biggest news stories of the moment.

In a separate announcement, YouTube also said that it would team up with the Witness Media Lab on a series of in-depth projects. Projects like these would focus on human rights struggles as seen from the perspective of those who live, witness, and experience them.