Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
YouTube is embracing news from “authoritative sources” at a time when Meta is reluctant to promote hard news or politics on Threads and X owner Elon Musk has taken a dismissive stance toward “legacy media.” Google’s video platform is rolling out a new “immersive watch page experience” on mobile that’s designed to suggest more news content when users are watching news videos. It also plans to spend $1.6 million to promote the creation of news content for its shortform Shorts service.
The new YouTube watch page will appear when you open a video that has a newspaper icon and will highlight relevant longform videos, livestreams, podcasts, and Shorts videos beneath your currently playing content. “We believe this updated news experience will…