The line between news on the television and online just got a little bit more blurred as Google News has announced it will now include YouTube videos.

According to a post by Olivia Ma, YouTube News Manager, to the Google News blog, the 25,000+ news sources currently aggregated by Google News can now apply to have their YouTube videos included in the service.  For those news outlets that choose to apply, and then get accepted, they could be looking at opening up their content to millions of new viewers.

Any news source that is interested in participating, they will first have to join the YouTube Partner Program. Acceptance into this program will get the stories featured on the YouTube news page. From there it is easy to get the stories featured on the Google News page as all they have to do is leave the embedding feature enabled and it’s all done.

Not only will inclusion in to the YouTube Partner Program get the news source more exposure, but it will also allow them to participate in advertising revenue sharing aspect of the program.  The combination of more exposure and potential advertising revenue makes this a win-win situation for the content creators.

Where the line is going to begin to blur more between online news and what we see on television is the speed with which news sources will now be able to put content online.  While you think mostly in terms of news anchors sitting behind a desk to report news, this new partnership could potentially lead to more quick videos being shot and uploaded directly to YouTube via mobile phones.  There’s nothing to say that the videos appearing in Google News have to be slickly produced, they just have to be from a partnership member and relevant to the news story.

There has been a lot said in recent days about how Internet news sources lagged behind on some major stories, but with the ability to just turn on a webcam now and upload their stories with no editing, all of that could change fairly quickly.  Take this very article you are reading for instance, imagine how much faster it could get online without proof reading, spell checking and so on.

This new development could be a major game changer for online news.

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Entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 3:38 pm under Google, Opinion, YouTube.

Read more entries by Sean P. Aune.
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