Thursday, December 17, 2009

My Brief Moment of Fame Following a Tragedy in Orem

Today was an interesting day and now I am famous all across Utah. Here is how it all went down.

My brother Graden came to visit with news that he had caught on camera the entire life cycle of a house catching on fire. While driving along, he saw firetrucks approaching so he pulled off to the side of the road. Then he noticed that the house across the street was smoking. He pulled out his camcorder and started filming. His video caught in high definition flames enveloping the house. It is a really sad story for the family, who lost their house. But Graden was in the right time and the right place to document this happening.

Being the entrepreneur that he is, Graden wanted to see if any of the news stations would like his footage. We started calling and we found instant interest. The news stations had arrived too late to the doused house to record anything interesting. They gladly agreed to accept the high quality video and credit my brother. The file was quite large (500 mb) so I had to work some magic to make it available for download on my server personal server.

A couple hours later, on the 6 o'clock news, KUTV and KSL both showed Graden's video. KUTV properly gave the credit to the video to Graden, but KSL, for some reason, credited the video to me. Later that night, the video was featured on the front page of KSL's website.

It is remarkable that my brother and I shaped the way that news was presented to Utah today. Without Graden's graphic footage and his willingness to share, the story might not have made such headlines. This is the direction that news will go in the future: citizen's media. The masses providing the masses with news. Sure, we will still need aggregators of news, but having a news agency gather all relevant news will soon be a thing of the past. News aggregators will have to inevitably rely on the masses to provide them with news. This will be only easier to accomplish with ubiquity in cell phones, cameras, and internet.

To see the video uncut, check it out on Youtube here. The flames get really big. Also, if you want to see me get credited on KSL for something I did not do, check it out on KSL's website.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

That was the worst thing ever. They lost their daughter and now this? Merry Christmas.... that made me cry. These are your neighbors so you better do something nice for them.

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Lynsey said...

Funny. I actually saw that on the news and I saw "Trenton Ostler" I wondered if it was you... but I didn't think it was because you don't live in Utah anymore. Congrats on being famous!