In a bid to support and sustain quality news reporting, YouTube is dropping a sweet $25m on funding respected news outlets using the platform.

This move is part of the Google News Initiative, a ongoing mission to help journalism thrive online.

The $25m will be split to support a number of endeavours. YouTube is building a working group of news outlets to help them develop new features and improve the news experience on the platform.

The likes of Vox media, Jovem Pan and India Today are among the outlets working inside the group. The investment will also proving innovation funding across 20 global markets, allowing news outlets to expand and enhance their video production faculties.

YouTube is also expanding its team of on-hand specialist to work directly with news outlets. These specialists will be trained to support channels and assist with day to day issues.

Authoritative and accessible 

To enable news outlets to be quick on the draw, YouTube is enabling the ability to provide a short written preview of a news article, that will link to an external article. 

This gives outlets time to create and put out video content, which usually takes longer to do than publishing an article online.

YouTube now also has a breaking news shelf, that will highlight videos from news organisations on the YouTube homepage. 

The top news feature launched in 17 countries yesterday, including the U.S., U.K., France, Italy, Japan, India, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa and Nigeria.

YouTube has also begun testing features that'll bring up local news first, as well being able to see information from third party resources. Articles from Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannia will appear alongside video content in order to counter 'fake news', which is greatly needed.