A year ago, I stuck my neck out and defended Demand Media’s approach to developing great content down on the content farm .

The Wall Street Journal announced it will launch a YouTube channel today that features “soft news” instead of “hard news.”

Reuters, one of the oldest and most respected news organizations in the world, has joined YouTube and will have a channel dedicated to all the world's news , including finance, politics, and technology.

In Part 2 of our series on the Orabrush YouTube marketing story, I interviewed Orabrush Spokesperson Austin Craig to talk about how he became the company’s spokesperson for their highly popular YouTube channel. ( You can read Part 1 here ).

Republican Presidential Candidate Herman Cain made news recently for his campaign cancelling an interview with newspaper this Thursday, saying it didn’t want the interview to be video recorded and arguing that video is only typical for television.

Several years ago, Diablo Cody launched her writing career by blogging her candid account of the life of an exotic dancer, which she then leveraged into the book Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper .

Maybe it’s time we let YouTube grow up. Maybe instead of constantly referencing YouTube as a site for “cat videos,” even when reporting on the advertising side of the site, we should start giving them their due for what they really are: a behemoth of advertising dollars, small business videos, and future television stars. YouTube is a little bit like a teenager, at least in terms of how the online media treats it

The time is now to counter the troubling proliferation of socially irresponsible video online, and that starts with each of us.