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=Pre-convening professional partner interview
Bill Densmore of the Media Giraffe Project interviews
Olivia Ma of YouTube=
Is YouTube starting to edge toward journalism with "news manager" looking for best videos?
Olivia Ma was a youth athlete in high school. It wasn't until a turn as an editor of the multi-campus print magazine "Currents" as an undergraduate at Harvard that she began to see the power of distributed journalism. Her job was to rally writers located at thirty elite U.S. campuses to write for "Current" on national topics.
Now, some five years later, the American history and literature major is rallying widely dispersed news contributors again. But the platform is vastly different. Two months ago, Ma became the first citizen-media manager at YouTube, the video-sharing platform that is owned by Google Inc., and based in San Bruno, Calif. It is perhaps significant that Ma's title is "manager" not "editor" -- Google executive say the search behemoth has no intention of getting to the editing business.
Ma is part of a nascent effort to inspire YouTube users to cover the news with cameras, and to find their work and give it some level of prominence on or near the YouTube home page. For her, it's a mission-driven assignment to be part of what her boss, Steve Grove, calls the "news community and team" at You Tube. The team has been in incubation since Feb. 2007. And Ma comes to it thinking of as a journalism assignment.
She says her job is not to program or edit YouTube, but to help the site's community to coalesce around the topic and production of news. The YouTube community team has people focused on film, comedy and other content areas besides news, she says.
"Our job is to two fold -- to help users who are creating content get discovered to the extent they are doing good work, and featuring videos that we think are good," she says. "So I think we do play a role in helping to surface good content, but we are not going to be playing the active role of editor. There is no analogy."
Leaving Cambridge, Ma moved to the San Francisco Bay area in the fall of 2006 and joined a startup called Plumb, a social-media sharing site -- she calls it "like De.licio.us on steroids." When the YouTube opportunity came up, she saw it as a dream job. "It was melding technology and sort of the authentic, user-driven media in an incredibly powerful platform."
"I knew that I wanted to be staying in journalism," she says. "It was clear that things were changing in a serious way and nobody really knew what to do . . . what's happening to the business model, all this stuff . . . I felt deeply that I wanted to be involved in helping to figure out what the future of journalism looked like."
Ma sees charting a future course for sustainable journalism as "a moral issue, not just a business issue." She adds: "I think that the service that journalism does for democracy, for the public good, is telling truth and getting people access to information that is important and relevant and has real effects, something we certainly can't let slip away."
Ma sees her role as cultivating a YouTube news community, encouraging users to practice citizen journalism. She acknowledges she and her colleagues are just beginning to discover what might be possible. Until now, YouTube hasn't dedicated any Significant effort to building a news community. "YouTube is a platform that can be used in this way. Not just citizen, even bigger mainstream media -- we want them to have a place on YouTube, too."
One possibility for YouTube -- an alliance with services such as NewsTrust.net, which help citizens to find and discern quality journalism. That skill -- media literacy -- is an exploding topic among journalists and educators alike, Ma says.
"How do we help people understand what content can be trusted, what's quality?" she asks. "All those questions -- are definitely one's we're asking and don't have answers to yet. ... I think YouTube is a bit of a chaotic sea of content -- which is one of its merits, but it is also difficult to navigate and find stuff in."
Ma finds professional passion in the overwhelming scope and opportunity of what she is doing -- from discovering a video that some amateur journalist did on an issue to having conversations with news- and technology-industry experts, to questions about news literacy and trust. "I'm really hoping to be a sponge and learn from the people who have been at this much longer than I in terms of trying to cultivate the individuals doing local journalism, the bloggers, the citizens."
One community Ma knows a lot about besides YouTube is the social-networking site Facebook. She lived at Harvard in the same dormitory as one of its co-founders, and terms herself a "huge user." She spends hours online, but she thinks Facebook has strengthened her real-world, physical relationships. It's for that reason that she thinks hyperlocal journalism, and just event and group organizing, aided by tools like YouTube and Facebook, will have a net positive impact on local communities.
"I think that the increasingly you are seeing -- take the Washington Post as an example -- clearly holes there are [coverage] holes that are being created because of cuts that are happening in the newsrooms," says Ma. "I think that placeblogging, it has been around for awhile, but it is going to become more a part of our everyday experience online . . . [and] we are really excited to explore how that looks on YouTube -- using the network effect of journalism to bring people together within communities.
Ma knows almost first-hand about the downsizing struggles within America's mainstream newsrooms -- she notes that her father, Christopher Ma, is a vice president of planning and development at the Washington Post Co., and publisher of its five-day free tabloid, “Express."
