NPR Adds Video Clips and Citizen Reporters Via YouTube Deal

A few months back, National Public Radio (NPR) redesigned its website, with the aim of becoming a more robust news destination site. As part of that redesign, a number of multimedia elements have started appearing at its website this fall.

One notable change was the inclusion of original text news reports, sometimes lengthy, as opposed to strictly audio reports, as had been the case in an earlier era.

Thus, it was only a matter of time, logically, before the network would begin integrating video into its site as well.

That day has arrived.

Yesterday, YouTube announced that NPR is one of a small number of media partners at the launch of a new service, “YouTube Direct,” that is meant to allow them to review and select video submissions from citizen journalists to embed in their sites. (The other launch partners are the Huffington Post, Politico, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, and WHDH-TV/WLVI-TV in Boston.)

Today, I asked Keith Jenkins, senior supervising producer of NPR multimedia, for his take on the deal.

“Online video is still finding its niche,” he told me. “A lot of early video was either too long or too repetitive to be effective. The ease of looking at it was a big factor. Obviously YouTube has done a lot to improve this.”

NPR has been in talks with YouTube over the past year, and the two companies have participated in a number of joint experiments, including “Reporter’s Network,” whereby professional journalists such as NPR’s Scott Simon have shared methodological tips with citizen journalists.

“It’s mutual,” Jenkins explained. “The combination of their interest in us, and our interest in them, with the number of eyeballs they have, has driven these talks. We want to test “YouTube Direct,” not only with our core radio audience, but as a way to reach new folks as well.”

Hosting a bunch of user-generated-content, especially as curated by NPR staff, could be a way for the network to bring down its overall cost of content production, while helping to grow audience share, especially among a younger demographic. That, clearly is the business goal here.

Can we expect this trend to continue?

“Video here has lots of different meanings here,” Jenkins said, noting recent experiments with integrating audio galleries with photos on YouTube. “But we know that, moving forward, NPR has got to have visual elements” in its content mix.

Related Bnet Clips:

NPR Redesigns to Provide a News Destination Site

Fliqz Launches Service to Drive Video Content to Top of Google Search

Thanks to Anna Christopher at NPR for help with this post.