How journalists behave when your video goes viral

How journalists behave when your video goes viral

Journalist Marc Settle found his video suddenly of great interest to a wider new media than just his employer, the BBC:

Broadly, their behaviour fell in to one of three categories:

a) Journalists working for sites who tweeted me to ask to use my video in some form and to whom I said “yes”.

b) Those who tweeted me and to whom I didn’t reply for various reasons (more on this in a moment), who went ahead and used it anyway.

c) Those who didn’t even bother to ask and used it anyway.

I find it hard to criticise those outlets that simply embedded Marc’s original tweet, because by sharing things on Twitter you grant permission for that. Those outlets that appear to have republished the video? Those are the ones that bother me.

More significantly, the insight into the exhausting and overwhelming effects of this level of media attention for a simple video is something we should all be aware of.