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June 18, 2015, 8:54 a.m.
Audience & Social
LINK: medium.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Joseph Lichterman   |   June 18, 2015

Storyful and Google News Lab today are launching YouTube Newswire, a dedicated YouTube channel meant to serve as a resource for journalists looking for user-generated videos from around the world by highlighting newsworthy videos uploaded to YouTube that have been verified by Storyful.

The social news agency’s expanded relationship with Google is just the latest area of growth since it was acquired by News Corp in December 2013. Beyond its core business of working with paying news clients, Storyful has begun working with brands and ad agencies, developed a creative desk to focus on viral videos, and built out its product team.

Part of Storyful’s growth plan has also been to enter public-facing partnerships like the one it’s announcing today with Google. In 2014, it began working with Facebook by creating FB Newswire, a feed of user-generated content originally posted on the social network. Its presence on Facebook has since grown to include FB Techwire, which covers tech news. Earlier this year, Storyful also partnered with Youku, the popular Chinese video-sharing platform.

Storyful’s deals with the various social platforms present an opportunity for the company to showcase the type of work it does and potentially attract new clients for its paid services. “The platforms for Storyful are both the source and the destination for great content and powerful storytelling,” Storyful managing editor Áine Kerr told me via email. “But those platforms are getting noisier and it’s our job to find the stories worth telling and help journalists do great journalism using the power of eyewitness media.”

YouTube Newswire is free for journalists to use, and links to the videos will be tweeted from a dedicated Twitter account and also featured in a daily newsletter. There are global and regional feeds on YouTube Newswire with videos covering news, weather, and politics.

YouTube has always been key to Storyful’s work of verifying social content — since its founding, Storyful has verified more than 100,000 different videos on the platform — and the two have partnered in various capacities since 2011. Together they’ve worked on projects such as CitizenTube and the Human Rights Channel. It’s also worked with YouTube to cover breaking news and elections around the world through dedicated channels. Storyful maintains an Open Newsroom group on Google+ where a group of several hundred journalists discuss verification and share tips and techniques.

Storyful is also a YouTube partner, which lets it help users it works with monetize their videos. In the two years since the company began managing videos for YouTubers, Storyful-managed videos have accumulated more than 2 billion views.

Google today is also announcing two other programs in which its partnering with Storyful: the First Draft Coalition and the Witness Media Lab. The First Draft Coalition is an education-focused effort that brings together experts in social media to develop resources explaining how to best verify user-generated content. The Witness Media Lab builds upon the already existing Human Rights Channel and will feature videos on issues of human rights around the world.

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