Amy Gahran: Can Anyone Stop Viral Spread of Colbert Tape?

Amy Gahran at Poynter wonders what news organizations can do once news footage - like the scathing roast of President Bush by Comedian Stephen Colbert - goes "viral".

Not much.

No. And the whole point is that it can't be stopped . At some point we need to have full disclosure of the political processes at work in this country. Stephen Colbert is just a start.

I think this video will be spreaded much more, because people find something real and true in it.
Colbert would make a nice presedent in some years.

The first of three eight-minute Colbert clips had netted over 600,000 views on YouTube before it was pulled for copyright infringement and was #1 in most viewed. #2 and #3 were the rest of his segment with over 400,000 and around 300,000 views, respectively. Shorter clips were at #6 and #17.

Although I am saddened to see that those were all pulled off YouTube where I could "see" the word spread by checking the view counts, I can understand C-SPAN's approach. It went viral - they wanted to make sure they got some love out of that.

However, I would have preferred that they work with all of the sites that posted video to get links back to the C-SPAN site (one of the two reasons given for posting on Google Video). I would have expected a majority of people who posted clips to be open to that.

The second reason - avoiding allegations of bias - would have been a little stickier to manage.

Looks like Robert Cox is working on the logistics of how this could work in the future.

Hi, B.L.

Actually, the point of my article was not to ask how news orgs could bar the door after the horses have fled the barn, but rather to see if there's any way that news organizations might leverage or benefit from footage that goes viral.

Thanks,

- Amy Gahran

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