After the hubbub died down a little, I consulted Google to gauge the dimension of this story. All of the major U.S. television networks — ABC, CBS, NBC — covered it. The story was on U.S. cable news. The Washington Post reported it. All of those newslike websites ate it up. I even saw it on some sort of Hollywood insider site, though no one involved had previously been famous.
And, yes, it went worldwide. The BBC had a report. The British tabloids ate it up, breathlessly reporting the girl accused of doing the pushing was seen, only days later, unrepentantly “partying” at the Clark County Fair. The story was on Australian TV, and in the New Zealand Herald. In fact, I got 594,000 hits when I did a news search for the words “Moulton Falls.”
This is what we call a viral story. I’m sure that by now you have heard this term. They are the children of the social media era, where people by the millions talk electronically about smallish things that catch their eye.
I wish I could say that all viral news stories are a bad thing, but they are like other consumer products. They can be used or abused.
What makes a story go viral? I am not an expert — there are some — but the most important characteristic I have noticed is that they have some sort of video. In this case, there is a video that shows the girl being shoved into the water.
They are understandable and relatable. Another recent viral story involved Mollie Tibbits, a 20-year-old Iowa girl who vanished in July. She looks like someone you might know, like a niece or a friend of your daughter’s. I see that story has generated about 7.5 million news mentions.
Sometimes we in the “mainstream media” try to launch viral stories. On Thursday, we published yet another story about D.B. Cooper, the man who hijacked an airliner in 1971 but whom has never been identified. We consider it “our story” because in 1980 some of Cooper’s loot was found near Frenchman’s Bar. Reporter Andy Matarrese’s story centered around the theories of a D.B. Cooper buff, and after we published it, we made sure to get it out there on social media.
It worked — it was one of our biggest stories of the day. And if past trends hold true, it will get a lot of readership for several weeks. It was an interesting story. But it wasn’t what I’d consider to be news.
Of course, we know viral stories aren’t really the biggest news stories in the world. On Aug. 9, the day of the Moulton Falls incident, our wire services’ top stories were about Paul Manafort’s trial, the Indonesian earthquake, and President Donald Trump’s proposed space force.
We carried those stories, of course. But compared with that Moulton Falls video, fewer people want to talk about them.
