YouTube has announced a new project to help connect people who happen to film something of news events with journalists who might want to use that footage in a news-context. It’s called YouTube Direct.

According to the YouTube Blog post about the new service, its development was motivated by the fact that a significant amount of the footage we see from elections, earthquakes, fires and other natural disasters comes from people just pulling out a phone or a camera and hitting the record button.

According to the folks at YouTube, the new service allows for “media organisations to request, review and rebroadcast YouTube clips directly from YouTube users.” The aim seems to be to provide more access to content for those assembling new stories, which should mean that we see more and more video clips starting to crop up in our web-based news.

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Google has responded to Rupert Murdoch’s claim that his News Corp sites would likely block Google from indexing them once they move to a for-pay model… and the response is excellent.

Murdoch had, in the past, essentially accused news aggregators like Google of living off the content that companies like News Corp paid to have produced. Murdoch seemed to be of the opinion that Google should, for some reason, be paying news sites to display their content, rather than getting a “free ride.” This is what led to the claim yesterday that Murdoch might have his sites removed from Google’s indexes.

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Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz has come out and said what a lot of people have been thinking about Yahoo for a while now; Yahoo has somehow managed to become a pretty stale name.

According to a Cnet report, Bartz was open and frank about the company’s position at the moment, saying that, “Yahoo was the big shining star in the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, and then somehow we weren’t so shiny anymore.” It’s no real surprise that Yahoo is being so honest, given its recent push to rebrand itself as a kind of universal homepage rather than a search engine.

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The Ministry of Defense is almost certainly going to place high in this week’s irony chart with the release of news that its document on stopping leaks from occurring has itself leaked.

The Telegraph is carrying the story that the document, weighing in at a truly staggering 2,400 pages, has managed to be leaked to the web and is now available to be viewed by… well, enemy spies, rogue agents, black operations and anyone who just wants to give it a look and see what’s going on in the Ministry of Defence about leaks and that.

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Google has unveiled a new feature that it hopes will make reading news on the web a quicker and less daunting prospect, in an attempt to emulate the virtues of reading from a newspaper or magazine.

For now, the feature is under the Google Labs tab, which generally means things aren’t finished or are under testing, but from what we’ve seen Fast Flip seems to be fairly robust. Basically it represents a collage of different publications’ articles all represented in a single Google style search, but as soon as you click through to an article you’re presented with it already loaded in a centralised column. Users can then use the Fast Flip tabs to move back and forth between articles as though they were pages in a magazine.

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