Journalists and YouTube: from reluctance to necessity

Abstract

YouTube is the second social network for news consumption (Reuters Institute, 2018) influencing directly on the information diet of citizens all over the world. The increase of online video viewing (Smith & Anderson, 2018) has provoked a reaction in the journalistic industry to attend the need to connect with an audience that constantly demands audiovisual content. It has been a challenging issue for the media industry to abandon their direct relationship with the audience, decentralize their production and disseminate content on channels such as YouTube (Peer & Ksiazek, 2011). On the other hand, they are aware of image allows to corroborate facts and, therefore, influences the credibility (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017). This exploratory research analyzes, from a qualitatively and quantitatively perspective, the presence of journalists on YouTube with the aim of finding out if they benefit or underuse the platform. After a selection process with 207 profiles focus on Spain, 78 of them have been selected to study aspects such as genres, topics, structure, intentionality… In addition, ten in-depth interviews with the most successful journalists in the platform were conducted to understand how they interact with their audiences. Results conclude that the role of the journalists promoting their professional profile on YouTube is scarce: 3,32% of registered reporters in Spain maintain an active channel, and only 0,21% of them obtain satisfactory results developing journalistic content. Finally, youtuber journalists consider that traditional colleagues still perceive the platform as a lower level channel and related to the infotainment.