YouTube is launching a new News Story feature on mobile devices that will make it easier for users to find and watch news content. Just like Google’s news feed, the new feature for Youtube will recommend news videos based on what users are already watching and will also recommended news articles and other text-based content.
This new feature is part of Google’s broader effort to make its video platform a more comprehensive destination for credible news and information. The News Story on Youtube will be providing an immersive view for news stories highlighting relevant longform news videos, live streams, podcasts, and Shorts videos beneath your currently playing content.
“We’re introducing an immersive watch page experience for news stories on YouTube. The news watch page will pull together content from authoritative sources across video on demand, live streams, podcasts, and Shorts, allowing viewers to deep dive and explore multiple sources and angles. All on one watch page, people will be able to find relevant long-form video, live coverage, and Shorts to quickly catch up,” announced YouTube in its official blog post.
Explaining how the new News Story feature will look and work, YouTube shows a short video demo illustrating that when a user opens a news video, the feature displays a list of related videos underneath it, organized into categories such as ‘Latest updates,’ ‘Explanations and commentary,’ ‘Live news,’ and ‘Shorts.’ Alongwith that the feature will also recommend videos from major news publishers, such as The Associated Press, Sky News, and CBS Evening News.
YouTube notes that users will be able to use the new News Story feature by clicking on a video with the newspaper icon on the homepage or in search results. The feature is rolling out over time for mobile users in approximately 40 countries, with desktop and living room integration to come.
Meanwhile YouTube is also investing $1.6 million to encourage news organizations to create short-form news content for its Shorts platform. The company is planning to work with over 20 news outlets in 10 countries to “jumpstart” the creation of short-form news content.
This investment is part of YouTube’s broader effort to make its platform a more comprehensive destination for news and information. The company is increasingly recognizing the importance of news content, and is investing in ways to make it more accessible and engaging for its users.
Notably, Google is investing in bringing authoritative news on YouTube at a time when other platforms are becoming more reluctant to promote news from traditional mainstream outlets.
Meta has recently announced that it does not plan to actively promote news content on its Threads app. This means that Meta will not be putting any effort into making news content visible or discoverable on Threads.
“Politics and hard news are inevitably going to show up on Threads – they have on Instagram as well to some extent – but we’re not going to do anything to encourage those verticals,” said Instagram head Adam Mosseri after launching Threads. In addition he even recently made it clear that Threads “won’t proactively recommend news content to people who don’t seek it out.”
Similarly, Elon Musk has expressed his dislike for the press, and under his leadership, his platform, X (formerly Twitter), no longer shows headlines on articles shared on the platform and has dismantled the system that verified journalists.
Source: India Today
