YouTube now getting same treatment as Citizen Journalism some years ago

My blogging has moved into LinkedIn Pulse where it gets some sort of audience. Now I am linking back to the original blogs which I left for tweets and soforth. Pulse posts are a form of blogging but you have to appear as a sort of consultant / objective comment. You can't just rave about whatever annoys you at the time. Or at least you have to wrap it up.

My most recent post is about a remix of Guardian story about OU. They start with the closures of local support centres in the UK. The background about the MOOC model and Futurelearn in particular is towards the end though I think this is the news and has a lot of positive aspects, well worth reporting.

I had thought I was a bit blunt but now today I read in the Guardian a view of YouTube in the context of public service broadcasting -

Before they started at secondary school two years ago, my older children regularly read the sports pages over breakfast or cuddled up to watch The X Factor on a Saturday night. Nowadays, they constantly scroll through Instagram and YouTube on phones that appear to have been grafted on to their fingers. The biggest threat to public service television is there, live and kicking, in my front room.
Where do they get their news from? Or learn about the world? Surely not just from videos of how to paint nails in ever weirder ways, or from vlogs on how to beat their mates at imaginary football games?
Their ability to make and share video content or communicate with their friends and the world beyond is infinitely greater than mine ever was. But just how good, for want of a better word, is that content? Does it make them better citizens as opposed to just bigger consumers with a lot more choice? 

This seems to me to be totally inaccurate as a description of what YouTube is. I find loads of content from universities. For example weekly updates from a Monash MOOC.  It reminds me of the way citizen journalism was mocked in Guardian media jokes a while ago. My guess is that things will change. Before too long the Guardian will offer courses at £49 a time about how your university can best use YouTube for content marketing.

I will try to swap tweets with David Puttman. I resist joining in the Guardian professional networks when there is still no reasonable explanation of how Guardian Talk came to be trashed. Our contribution could just vanish at any time. Jane Martinson claims that the Guardian networks can help to replace the decline in public service broadcasting for education.  Not sure about this, and no reason to knock YouTube as part of the promotion. By the way, Jam from the BBC was quite a good idea and the newspapers that blocked it have not really filled the space. Just my opinion.

Could someone at the Guardian spend half a day actually looking at YouTube and report on what they find? Please stop the nonsense. No good will come of it.