In another sign of their savvy web strategy, The Guardian have signed up YouTube makeup star Lauren Luke to write a column (with accompanying video) in the revamped Weekend section (they also just happened to run a full page story on Luke in Saturday’s paper.)
The importance of people like Lauren – a 27-year-old single mother who lives with her son, mum, sister and nieces – to online news distribution is made pretty clear by the following quote from the article:
“A brief BBC interview with Luke for a local Tyneside news programme has been seen by more than 2.2 million people, becoming one of the most viewed BBC clips on YouTube worldwide.”
And here it is:
I’ve written previously that if you want to get into journalism you should have a blog. I’d add to that: if you want your own column, you should build up a following on YouTube too. News organisations will increasingly not just be looking for people who know what they’re talking about, but how to distribute it effectively online.
Shame the video’s not embeddable though.
UPDATE (of sorts): As if to reinforce my point, the Washington Post “has appointed a new multimedia journalist as a result of his participation in a YouTube contest” – although this was a more traditional reporting job obtained through a YouTube journalism contest – Project:Report.
Online Journalism Blog 
yes, I saw that on Friday and thought the same thing about the lack of embed code – undermines the spirit of the thing a bit!
Hi Paul
I so agree. I think we should be looking for minimum social media footprints for all candidates – marketing, sales AND journalists. Otherwise we will appoint traditional people in our own image and end up having to train them. Oh, I am not talking about taking on people solely qualified in social media but rather people good at core skills who happen to have bothered to set up a blog, a Twitter account and used LinkedIn. It does not seem much to ask.
Thanks John – like the idea of a ‘social media footprint’. Sounds like something you could insert in a job ad: “Desirable: visible social media footprint”
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What a fantastic story! In terms of the video not being “embeddable” – do you mean the one in your post? If so …
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