I think this is probably my favorite story of the week – this homeless dude has been collecting money at some intersection in Ohio with a sign saying that he has “the God Given Gift of Voice.” Apparently he’s a former radio/voice-over guy who hit hard times with drugs and alcohol a couple of years ago, but has been trying ever since to get his life back. Well, a photographer from the Columbus Dispatch shot a video of him one day, the video ended up on YouTube, and within a matter of days the guy’s life has flipped 180 degrees…
Some 14 million views later, Ted Williams spent the last half of this week making appearances on TV, radio, getting reunited with his 90 year-old mother, and after a flood of job offers, last I could follow it sounded like he was going to take a job announcing and doing other work for the Cleveland Cavaliers, who offered him a full-time job and a house! The videos are numerous at this point, but he’s just such a humble guy – talk about a nice, feel-good story to kick off the new year!
And it was all thanks to the Internet – who knew?!
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That said, the only negative thing to say about this story is that the Columbus Dispatch made a really bonehead move as far as this video was concerned because about three days after it went viral and had millions of hits, they filed a DMCA claim with YouTube to have it removed for copyright infringement. The video above is actually a repost that they did on a newly-created channel of their own, and I guess my big beef with the whole thing is just how out of touch is proves that at least one person in their newsroom is. I’m not debating their right to remove the video – that’s certainly how copyright works, but doesn’t necessarily mean that it was the right thing to do.
Notice how the “official video” only has a couple of hundred views, tops … whereas the original video had upwards of 14 million. Now I’m sure what happened here is someone from the Dispatch saw those numbers and said, “Why aren’t we getting any of those hits?!” Even though the video listed them as the creator and even had a link in the description, they probably figured that it would better affect them if the video was on a channel of their own instead of the random guy who ripped it from dispatch.com. As a result, however, not only was the huge view count and all of the comment history lost when the original video was removed, but it also killed all of the links that blogs and various news organizations had been linking to, thus making it harder for people to find the actual story.
Sure, their claim was that they had no intention of preventing people from seeing the video, but their short-sightedness resulted in just that nonetheless. Because let’s face it – this video didn’t go viral by people flocking to dispatch.com to see it … it exploded when somebody posted it to YouTube – a site with a little more global reach than a newspaper’s website targeting Columbus, Ohio! Had they pulled this stunt earlier, it may not even had made its rounds at all, and Ted Williams would still be out panhandling instead of getting the second chance that he deserves. On top of that, now the video has been copied more than ever on YouTube and they’ve got a whole slew of angry commenters pointing out the arrogance of their decision.
I guess it’s just disappointing that amidst this great round of publicity that the Dispatch could brag they started (which apparently they have been doing anyways), such a knee-jerk reaction proves just how bad old media still doesn’t get how popularity works on the Internet. You don’t get to pick what’s popular on the Internet – all you can do is be thankful when something appeals to the masses, and if you try to interfere with that process the Internet, it will bite back. Of course, if they had been on the ball and posted their content to YouTube in the first place instead of keeping things on their little newspaper website like every other old media company…