Broadcast Yourself-Global News! A Netnography of the “Flotilla” News on YouTube

Abstract

In this article, YouTube is examined as an evolving news medium in the context of global journalism. The article examines what the news is made of and YouTube's distinctive features as an emerging news culture and style. The article is based on netnography, in which the construction and circulation of a news story have been tracked by tracing the so-called “flotilla” news event. It is found that YouTube promotes visually motivated, amateur-driven news culture that alters the truth claims of news and the professional hegemony of news making, and affects the ways in which we, as the audience, maintain relations with professional news institutions, people, places, and practices related to news making and the globalized world beyond “our own.”