By Aaron Zlatkin
I always get a thrill of satisfaction whenever my birth city makes it into the news. The outside world’s grudging recognition that Cincinnati is in fact a place, and that things sometimes happen there, gives me an opportunity to see my hometown through someone else’s eyes. Of course, when Cincinnati makes it into the national press, it has historically been for not very awesome reasons. Like that time we had the riots. Or the time a really awesome band came to town for a concert, so we stampeded each other to death. Or that time one of our council members resigned because he got caught writing a personal check to a prostitute (and the coda, in which we accepted his apology so much that he became mayor, and later still became Jerry Springer). Or when Marge Schott owned the Reds. Or when we got the vapors over Mapplethorpe.
Or the time when, as God as our witness, we thought turkeys could fly.
The point is, seeing my hometown from the perspective of other cities has not always been satisfying so much as enlightening. So when I first heard about a gorilla being shot at the Cincinnati Zoo after a child fell into the enclosure, I had a vague sense of foreboding as I realized I would probably get the opportunity again.
What I did not expect was the fascination of having a front row seat to a viral phenomenon, from breaking news all the way to “Hey, remember when that gorilla thing happened?” Which, all told, was about a week and a half. In some ways (after a couple of days following the news like everyone else) I became more fascinated with attempting to trace the spread of the story than the story itself. And not in the literal sense of how widely it disseminated, or how many hits the video got on YouTube, but in the viral sense: what hot button topics would naturally arise from the event; how would the imagery get repurposed in gifs and satirical motivational posters; how long before the thoughtful, in-depth reporting begins; and, of course, how long before it becomes old news and just as quickly forgotten?
Part of the answer to those questions depends upon what kind of story you’re looking at. Is it breaking news, or is it an in depth expose? According to a 2014 study that looked at the life of news articles published at Al Jazeera English:
“News articles describing breaking news events tend to decay in attention shortly after they are published and thus have a shorter shelf-life. These articles also have more repetitive social media reactions, as most users simply repeat the news headlines without commenting on them. In-Depth items portraying or analyzing a topic tend to exhibit a longer shelf-life and a richer social media response, including more content-rich tweets in terms of vocabulary entropy and fraction of unique tweets, and more shares on Facebook for the same level of tweets.
“By going deeper into the first few hours after publication of News articles, we found three distinctive response patterns in a roughly 80:10:10 proportion: decreasing traffic, steady or increasing traffic, and rebounding traffic. We found that there can be multiple causes for nondecreasing traffic, including the addition of new content to articles, social media reactions, and other types of referrals” (Castillo, et al., 2013).
What is overlooked in this study is the nature of a viral news event, which is usually by definition both a breaking news story with developments over time, and an opening to a discussion of larger issues in society. For a story like Harambe, or Columbine, or whatever, the event itself is shocking enough to create interest (small boy falls two stories into a wild animal lair!), has enough conflicting interpretations to be compelling for a while (was the gorilla actually protecting the boy?), and intersects with so many larger issues (conservation, parenting, conceptions of responsibility, and perhaps the biggest issue of all: how exactly does one harvest sperm from a dead gorilla, and who got stuck with that job?).
While I found plenty of research about online news readership that focuses on the predictability of visitor interactions (hits, shares, likes, comments, etc) in order to determine the shelf-life of an article (Castillo et al), or the best structure of a web site for news-reader optimization, I have yet to find an article that lays out plainly how a news story like Harambe’s death migrates through all of the varied media outlets we visit throughout the day. I had hoped to find something that explained how the story moves from breaking news on local TV stations and localized Facebook posts, to viral video uploads and national news stories, then exploding into the realm of online opinion (comment sections of news articles, blog posts, Twitter feeds), then the inevitable visual memes that repackage the core image of the event (now universally recognizable) into something irreverent, or politically charged, or obscenely racist. Then come the longer, more thoughtful essayist pieces that focus on ancillary issues raised by the initial news event: the Wired article about gorilla conservation, the HuffPo article about the plight of gorillas around the world (is it too on the nose that it was written by their “Viral News Editor?”), or Rachel’s essay with a focus on representations of the mother.
Like the five stages of grief, these steps need not occur in this precise order, or even at all, but what cannot be denied or bargained away is that they are all a part of the news cycle now. Whether it is the death of Osama bin Laden, the hacking of Jennifer Lawrence’s phone, the international crisis that brought into tense conflict Australia’s government and Johnny Depp’s dogs, or the shooting death of a gorilla in a zoo, each of the above steps in the movement of the story should seem familiar to anyone literate in the mediascape. Information now spreads more like an ink spill on fibrous paper. Even better: it spreads like that virus at the end of Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
What I’m getting at with all these tortured analogies is this: the linear model of communication on which the news industry has historically been structured no longer holds. News, especially anything with a viral component to it, is transactional along every step of its life-cycle; that is, it is an act and a reaction – in short, a dialogue. In order to begin to fully appreciate this shift, one only need consider how "Hands Up, Don’t Shoot" became a legitimate, nationwide political protest movement: from the shooting of unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to the perpetual reiterations of the phrase that spawned the message that spawned the memes, that led to further news coverage. “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” was not a 3 or 4-day news cycle. In truth, it never left – it is part of the social lexicon now.
And to fully appreciate how little the traditional news outlets appreciate the shift from linear to transactional, just watch a cable news host read tweets from viewers on the air, as though he were doing a great public service by “giving” these plebes a “voice.”
I don’t know how much one could conclude quantitatively about interest in the story of Harambe. As best I could tell, a couple of days passed before we began to see stories taking a broader perspective on the themes hidden in the event: the proper role of zoos, the ethics of keeping animals in captivity at all, and the responsibility we all bear to be mindful in such a public space.
From the original events of May 28th until this Wired article explored the question in some depth, five days had passed before anyone seemed to wonder publicly about the other gorillas living with Harambe. And I do not mean discussion of what his death might mean for conservation efforts and breeding, but how his death signified to the other gorillas in his troop, especially Chewie and Mara, with whom he was destined to mate. Did they see any of it? Did they sense the guilt and shame and anger pouring off of the zookeepers in waves? Does the incident affect their behaviors, or their interactions with their human handlers? Do they trust us less now?
Perhaps the big takeaway from all of this is what we can learn about our own interests and priorities. Not only is a human life worth more than that of a gorilla, but the human perspective is vastly more important than the perspective of any one member of the band of gorillas who had lived with him for over a year. Or maybe that kind of empathy take us too much out of our comfort zone of dominance.
Or the time when, as God as our witness, we thought turkeys could fly.
The point is, seeing my hometown from the perspective of other cities has not always been satisfying so much as enlightening. So when I first heard about a gorilla being shot at the Cincinnati Zoo after a child fell into the enclosure, I had a vague sense of foreboding as I realized I would probably get the opportunity again.
What I did not expect was the fascination of having a front row seat to a viral phenomenon, from breaking news all the way to “Hey, remember when that gorilla thing happened?” Which, all told, was about a week and a half. In some ways (after a couple of days following the news like everyone else) I became more fascinated with attempting to trace the spread of the story than the story itself. And not in the literal sense of how widely it disseminated, or how many hits the video got on YouTube, but in the viral sense: what hot button topics would naturally arise from the event; how would the imagery get repurposed in gifs and satirical motivational posters; how long before the thoughtful, in-depth reporting begins; and, of course, how long before it becomes old news and just as quickly forgotten?
Part of the answer to those questions depends upon what kind of story you’re looking at. Is it breaking news, or is it an in depth expose? According to a 2014 study that looked at the life of news articles published at Al Jazeera English:
“News articles describing breaking news events tend to decay in attention shortly after they are published and thus have a shorter shelf-life. These articles also have more repetitive social media reactions, as most users simply repeat the news headlines without commenting on them. In-Depth items portraying or analyzing a topic tend to exhibit a longer shelf-life and a richer social media response, including more content-rich tweets in terms of vocabulary entropy and fraction of unique tweets, and more shares on Facebook for the same level of tweets.
“By going deeper into the first few hours after publication of News articles, we found three distinctive response patterns in a roughly 80:10:10 proportion: decreasing traffic, steady or increasing traffic, and rebounding traffic. We found that there can be multiple causes for nondecreasing traffic, including the addition of new content to articles, social media reactions, and other types of referrals” (Castillo, et al., 2013).
What is overlooked in this study is the nature of a viral news event, which is usually by definition both a breaking news story with developments over time, and an opening to a discussion of larger issues in society. For a story like Harambe, or Columbine, or whatever, the event itself is shocking enough to create interest (small boy falls two stories into a wild animal lair!), has enough conflicting interpretations to be compelling for a while (was the gorilla actually protecting the boy?), and intersects with so many larger issues (conservation, parenting, conceptions of responsibility, and perhaps the biggest issue of all: how exactly does one harvest sperm from a dead gorilla, and who got stuck with that job?).
While I found plenty of research about online news readership that focuses on the predictability of visitor interactions (hits, shares, likes, comments, etc) in order to determine the shelf-life of an article (Castillo et al), or the best structure of a web site for news-reader optimization, I have yet to find an article that lays out plainly how a news story like Harambe’s death migrates through all of the varied media outlets we visit throughout the day. I had hoped to find something that explained how the story moves from breaking news on local TV stations and localized Facebook posts, to viral video uploads and national news stories, then exploding into the realm of online opinion (comment sections of news articles, blog posts, Twitter feeds), then the inevitable visual memes that repackage the core image of the event (now universally recognizable) into something irreverent, or politically charged, or obscenely racist. Then come the longer, more thoughtful essayist pieces that focus on ancillary issues raised by the initial news event: the Wired article about gorilla conservation, the HuffPo article about the plight of gorillas around the world (is it too on the nose that it was written by their “Viral News Editor?”), or Rachel’s essay with a focus on representations of the mother.
Like the five stages of grief, these steps need not occur in this precise order, or even at all, but what cannot be denied or bargained away is that they are all a part of the news cycle now. Whether it is the death of Osama bin Laden, the hacking of Jennifer Lawrence’s phone, the international crisis that brought into tense conflict Australia’s government and Johnny Depp’s dogs, or the shooting death of a gorilla in a zoo, each of the above steps in the movement of the story should seem familiar to anyone literate in the mediascape. Information now spreads more like an ink spill on fibrous paper. Even better: it spreads like that virus at the end of Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
What I’m getting at with all these tortured analogies is this: the linear model of communication on which the news industry has historically been structured no longer holds. News, especially anything with a viral component to it, is transactional along every step of its life-cycle; that is, it is an act and a reaction – in short, a dialogue. In order to begin to fully appreciate this shift, one only need consider how "Hands Up, Don’t Shoot" became a legitimate, nationwide political protest movement: from the shooting of unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to the perpetual reiterations of the phrase that spawned the message that spawned the memes, that led to further news coverage. “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” was not a 3 or 4-day news cycle. In truth, it never left – it is part of the social lexicon now.
And to fully appreciate how little the traditional news outlets appreciate the shift from linear to transactional, just watch a cable news host read tweets from viewers on the air, as though he were doing a great public service by “giving” these plebes a “voice.”
I don’t know how much one could conclude quantitatively about interest in the story of Harambe. As best I could tell, a couple of days passed before we began to see stories taking a broader perspective on the themes hidden in the event: the proper role of zoos, the ethics of keeping animals in captivity at all, and the responsibility we all bear to be mindful in such a public space.
From the original events of May 28th until this Wired article explored the question in some depth, five days had passed before anyone seemed to wonder publicly about the other gorillas living with Harambe. And I do not mean discussion of what his death might mean for conservation efforts and breeding, but how his death signified to the other gorillas in his troop, especially Chewie and Mara, with whom he was destined to mate. Did they see any of it? Did they sense the guilt and shame and anger pouring off of the zookeepers in waves? Does the incident affect their behaviors, or their interactions with their human handlers? Do they trust us less now?
Perhaps the big takeaway from all of this is what we can learn about our own interests and priorities. Not only is a human life worth more than that of a gorilla, but the human perspective is vastly more important than the perspective of any one member of the band of gorillas who had lived with him for over a year. Or maybe that kind of empathy take us too much out of our comfort zone of dominance.