Google takes three big steps into eyewitness news

Google News Lab today launched three new initiatives aimed at supporting news organisations in the discovery and verification of eyewitness news – the YouTube Newswire, the First Draft Coalition and the WITNESS Media Lab.

The newswire, developed in partnership with Storyful, is intended to be a "go-to" resource for journalists, according to Olivia Ma, head of strategy and operations at Google News lab.

"Storyful's team of editors will be discovering and verifying all videos before including them in the Newswire," Ma told Journalism.co.uk, "which will live as a curated feed on YouTube and Twitter."

User-generated content is only becoming a more important part of the newsgathering processOlivia Ma, Google News Lab

Eyewitness video footage has become an invaluable resource for journalists and with more than 5 million hours of news video, YouTube is the main platform where people go to watch and upload their video content.

Journalists can also receive a daily round-up of the most relevant global and regional video news stories straight to their inbox.

The First Draft Coalition will bring together pioneers in social media journalism from Eyewitness Media Hub, Storyful, Bellingcat, reported.ly, SAM Desk, Meedan, Emergent and Verification Junkie to share their expertise with journalists through tools, how-to-posts, ethics training and case studies of global news stories.

The website will not go live until autumn, but some initial posts on Medium include insights on geolocating content from Bellingcat's Eliot Higgins and a 'pocket guide' on verifying video details from reported.ly's Malachy Browne.

"User-generated content is only becoming a more important part of the newsgathering process, and we want to empower journalists with the tools and skills they need to discover and verify this type of eyewitness footage," Ma said.

Some of the most important news stories in recent months, like the protests in Ferguson and the Nepal earthquake, have largely unfolded on YouTube, but the platform has also been the destination for video footage of human rights atrocities happening worldwide.

In collaboration with WITNESS, an international organisation that trains people to use video to tackle human rights issues, YouTube hopes to address the way in which eyewitnesses capture footage and how it can be used to bring about change.

The first project in the WITNESS Media Lab initiative aims to explore cases of police brutality in the US and the impact of video footage taken by bystanders.

Ma said the Google News Lab is an "effort to empower innovation at the intersection of technology and media", working closely with Google's Digital News Initiative and "powering its research and training efforts".

Update: This article has been updated to reflect that the WITNESS Media Lab is a collaboration between WITNESS and the News Lab at Google.

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