Video social media giant YouTube recently released Newswire, a feed for verified eyewitness news reports and raw footage of actual newsworthy topics. This is excellent news for journalists looking for world or local news to cover online. Newswire will only post genuine news stories, saving people from the hassle of having to sift through various videos and trying to identify possibly hoax stories.

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YouTube Newswire comes with channels for both global and regional news from reputable sources of relevant user-generated news from various sources around the world.

According to PCMag, YouTube will have the Storyful social media news team verify each video that gets posted on the Newswire feed. Users may also subscribe to YouTube's daily newsletter to have videos relevant to their specifications delivered straight to their email. Users may also opt to follow a news story directly through the website.

Tech giant Google, who owns the rights to YouTube, reports that more than 5 million hours worth of news videos are being watched on the social media site every day, and "the role of the eyewitness has never had a more vital place in the newsgathering process."

Thanks to the advent of the Internet, anyone anywhere can take a video of a news story through their smartphones and share it with a global audience. However, the danger comes when real news becomes intermingled with false reports or videos intended purely to confuse viewers. Indeed, in the fast-paced world of today, where an endless stream of content courses through the internet every day, finding relevant stories and content is becoming more and more troublesome. This is all the more true for one of the world's largest social media sites.

To further its goals of providing quality, relevant, and accurate eyewitness accounts of news through videos, Google is also in partnership with WITNESS Media Lab. This company aims to highlight struggles, losses, and victories in the arena of human rights through eyewitness accounts. For instance, it recounts how user-generated videos have helped shape the way people viw police brutality in the United States.

WITNESS media believes in strengthening human rights documentation and advocacy through finding, verifying, and contextualizing videos created by eyewitnesses.

TagsYouTube, newswire, Video, eyewitness reports