LiveLeak Website Focuses On Subjects Like Crime And War.

By MELISSA VARGAS
Star-Telegram staff writer
LiveLeak.com isn't like YouTube and doesn't want to be, officials say.

Launched in October of 2006, the United Kingdom-based site is dedicated to news and global affairs and often has videos with upsetting material and disturbing images from North Texas to the Middle East, co-founder Hayden Hewitt said in a phone interview recently from Manchester, England.

"This isn't a place to launch your pop-star career," he said. "We occupy a niche that caters to a more serious audience. We are showing things that people can't see elsewhere."

Marketed only through word-of-mouth, the site averages about 600,000 unique visitors daily and several million per month, Hewitt said.

Leak suppliers

Once users create free accounts with the site, they can post videos and search for them using keywords.

There are "thousands" of videos uploaded on the site; so many that Hewitt says he doesn't want to know an exact number.

Police car dash-camera videos, helicopter footage and surveillance recordings are just a few of the videos that users can see on LiveLeak. While some of the footage is taken from television news reports, much of it appears to be raw.

For instance, the site has the full version of the widely-publicized video of two Watauga toddlers being taught to smoke marijuana by two teenagers. The site also has helicopter video from the Arlington police standoff in which the suspect drove through a police barricade and into a lake before killing himself, and several Fort Worth police chases from dash cameras and helicopters.

The site also has numerous videos from Iraq and Afghanistan, including suicide bombings, gunbattles and other graphic images.

Don't ask, don't tell

Hewitt doesn't know where posters get their material and the site doesn't require them to tell. However, Hewitt suspects that some of the footage comes from people close to police investigations.

"We don't ask for them to explain as long as it meets our terms of service," he said. "We don't want to see beheadings or anything."

In the coming year, LiveLeak will push for more citizen journalism, Hewitt said. Some of the videos on the site are accompanied by anonymous articles. Others are posted with little or no information.

Hewitt said the site will call for people to be more passionate about the news and what's going on in their city, "not just people accidentally catching things on their camera phones," he said.