If Google can have a channel, so should news organizations

Does your news organization have a YouTube video channel featuring a fresh stream of originally produced videos? It should. And it wouldn’t be that hard to do, nor expensive.

So that idea came to me after having watched a couple great videos on The Official Google Channel on YouTube. (I’ve attached one of those videos, a talk on the Google campus by Getting Things Done guru Dave Allen, to the end of this blog item.)

Google, being a great place to work, apparently has a stream of guest speakers coming through giving workshops and lectures. The company, smartly, videotapes the talks and puts them on YouTube. Being a smart company, they don’t keep this great information to themselves and restrict access just to their employees — even though Google paid for the speakers. Google is, after all, all about sharing the world’s knowledge, so it’s a fit with the company’s mission and ethics.

You know, of course, what organizations also are well positioned to have their own channels: newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, magazines, and online news sites. Nearly all news organizations have a steady stream of politicians, celebrities, athletes, experts, etc. coming through their doors — for interviews with reporters, with the editorial board, and so on.

So here’s a simple notion that’ll amp up your presence on YouTube and other channels (such as Facebook, MySpace, et al): Create your own channel, a la Google, and post raw video of interviews with some of those people. Record editorial board meetings where there are guests and post the video. This requires a change in mindset, from those interviews being a part of the reporting process not meant for outside consumption, to the interviews actually being content.

This would be relatively cheap to do. The only thing holding you back is clinging to the old ways.

Now here’s the Dave Allen lecture. As not of the most organized people in the world, I’m trying hard to learn from Allen. His Google lecture is worth a viewing.