YouTube, the videos sharing and viewing site, has become a major platform for news today, where people are turning for eyewitness videos in times of major events and natural disasters. The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism has released their examination of 15 months of the Google-owned site and found that while viewership for TV news still easily outpaces those consuming news on YouTube, the video-sharing site is a growing digital environment where professional journalism mingles with citizen content.

"There's a new form of video journalism on this platform," said Amy Mitchell, deputy director of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. "It's a form in which the relationship between news organizations and citizens is more dynamic and more multiverse than we've seen in most other platforms before."

The study shows YouTube as a global news arena where professional and amateur video bleed together, and is made consumable in on-demand style.

That kind of atmosphere also makes for issues of authenticity. Though YouTube has guidelines for news video, they aren't always followed and some videos go viral despite uncertain sources. "This is a young platform and there're certainly aspects of this interplay and the way information is going to flow that's still being worked out," said Mitchell.

A relatively nascent new organisation, Russia Today, a network founded in 2005 and backed by the Russian government that often reports rumor, had easily the most videos among the most-viewed. The second most-viewed news organization among the top videos was Fox News, although the study pointed out that more than half of those videos were posted in criticism of the network.