User-Generated Videos Amplify Social Movements in 2020

With a devastating pandemic, social unrest, and economic woes, the year 2020 has already become a pivotal one in world history. In documenting it, news organizations are relying more than ever on the raw truth and emotional power of user-generated content to tell breaking news stories.

Jukin Media, a global leader in the viral video sourcing, rights, and licensing industry, works with a wide range of marquee-name news organizations, advertisers, and film and TV producers, providing authentic, high-quality, user-generated content.

To date, Jukin Media has generated more than $25 million for creators of this content, who have worked with the company to license their videos. Jukin believes user-generated content (UGC) is the future of storytelling. It works with more than 50,000 amateur video creators to optimize the returns on their videos.

Next-generation newsrooms

The rise of smartphones has created an explosion of content that savvy news organizations can take advantage of. User-generated photos and videos can illustrate events powerfully and provide unique, on-the-ground perspectives that news organizations simply can’t access in any other way.

A reshaping of trust

UGC is part of a larger conversation around the trust — or lack thereof — that many people have in news and media organizations. Experts point out that eroding trust in these institutions has been replaced with growing confidence in crowd-supplied, user-generated, peer-vetted content to give people ground-level information about what’s happening in their world.

As a number of recent media missteps have made abundantly clear, one of the problems contributing to the lack of trust in traditional media is the fact that many traditional newsrooms are still largely white — they don’t look like the communities their publications are supposed to cover.

The life experiences of reporters and editors affect not only their takes on news stories, but their perceptions of what’s newsworthy in the first place. The blind spots that result have serious implications for the future of news and its ability to draw attention to real problems that need solving. That’s one big gap that high-quality UGC is already filling.

The revolution is streaming

Much of the most valuable UGC today provides eyewitness documentation of the Black Lives Matter protests that have spread across the world in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, an African American man killed by a Minneapolis police officer.

That incident was recorded by mobile phone footage taken by bystanders, some of whom can be heard pleading with officers to stop as Floyd cried out that he couldn’t breathe. The New York Times and several other media outlets relied in part on bystander video to help draw accurate conclusions about exactly had happened to Floyd.

As one protestor in New York City recently shouted out, this particular revolution is “going to be streamed!”

Citizen video transforms the world

User-generated video’s role in breaking news isn’t new.

It was a man on a balcony with a camcorder in 1991 who filmed Los Angeles police’s brutal arrest of Rodney King. The pro-democracy uprisings known as the Arab Spring were documented on mobile phones and widely shared on social media.

And it was people with cell phone cameras who have recorded high-profile incidents of police violence against not only George Floyd, but also Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Eric Garner in New York City, for example.

UGC has also provided the first and best documentation of incidents such as a Philadelphia police officer using a metal baton to beat a Temple University student during a protest. Release of that video prompted authorities to release the student from custody and launch an investigation of the officer’s conduct.

Thanks in part to video footage taken by victims of these injustices, their families, and bystanders, the world has finally been forced to confront a mass of first-hand evidence that change is desperately needed.

Organizers of Black Lives Matter and other protests have frequently credited user-generated video, shared widely on social platforms, with helping propel their movements into public consciousness, organize events, and create broader coalitions of support that bring people together.

The role of UGC and social media platforms doesn’t stop there. The instant connections it sparks have enabled people who are physically far away from the site of a protest to join in and offer practical support and moral witness as well.

A wealth of newsroom-ready footage

Jukin Media, which adds new user-generated videos to its extensive library daily, provides news producers with a rich repository of licensed footage documenting the protests and other newsworthy current events. This content includes videos showing protestors masked and socially distanced while engaging in peaceful protest, gathering outside Los Angeles City Hall and other public venues, removing a controversial statue that honored a British slave trader, and creating vivid murals as reminders that Black Lives Matter.

To learn more about how Jukin Media can work with the media to provide authentic, user-generated video content that enhances news coverage, visit JukinMedia.com.