I've been an avid viewer of YouTube videos far longer than I have been a journalist.
And no, I'm not just talking about silly cat videos. I began following channels like The Vlogbrothers, Five Awesome Girls, Wheezy Waiter and Ze Frank before being a YouTuber was actually a feasible job and form of income. I loved coming home after school and watching people sit in front of their web cams as they talked about something compelling, meaningless or just about their day. In 2008, it was a new form of media that was more personal than television; middle-school-aged me was all about it.
Fast forward about five or six years. YouTube, used as a news platform? College-aged me was (and still is) all about it.
I found The Young Turks sometime around 2012 or 2013 as a "recommended video" on my YouTube homepage. At the time, I was subscribed and familiar with other YouTube news channels like Sxephil and SourceFed as a way to get my news quickly and humorously — but I never thought of YouTube as a place to get serious and complicated news until I found The Young Turks.
And YouTube should be taken seriously, as expressed in a fairly recent Independent article. Serious news is coming from a serious journalist who will not be taken seriously by a mainstream outlet. And when mainstream will not accept you (he was also on MSNBC before his executives told him to tone down his reporting), the next step is to self-publish and produce content — which is exactly what The Young Turks did. Sitting at over 3 million subscribers, their actions appear to be working.
It's great to see an outlet grow up with you. While YouTube is still a place for silly vlogs and cat videos, it's also a place for serious journalism and hard-hitting reporting. YouTube is an excellent medium for everything that isn't quite fit for TV or movies. It's nice to see it can offer both compelling content and fluffy content.
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