Good news rules for Goodwin as bird story goes Viral
Cole Goodwin comes by their affinity for our avian friends rightly. Cole is seen here with their mom’s chicken, well, named Chicken who is over ten years old. Biscuit could not make it to the photo shoot due to an untimely meeting with a raccoon.
By Tom Peterson
In a world sometimes seemingly so full of strife and misery, it is uplifting when something simple and pure can seize the day.
In the news, it is so often that bad news gets the biggest response from readers, but that was simply not so here at CCCNews during the past four days.
Reporter Cole Goodwin took wing and proved that stereotype wrong, at least for a short time, with a simple story about our feathered friends. Have you seen these birds at your winter bird feeders?
The timing, it turns out, was perfect. Most of us in the Northwest were serving house arrest as a winter storm was bearing down. And it also became abundantly clear our feathered friends were cold and hungry.
And some birdfeed on a back porch could attract some rare or shy birds during the tempest.
Goodwin’s story has become our most popular to date, garnering more than 80,000 views in the last four days.
Surprised?
“Yes and no,” Goodwin said. “I love birds and bird watching. When I worked for the Forest Service I got to learn a lot about birds in our area and got to see the passion people have for them in the Gorge. So, it's not surprising that locals were looking at this story. What surprised me was the number of out-of-state views. I did not expect it to go viral.”
But it did.
Soon a mass feeding of both birds and knowledge was on as Goodwin’s story blew up across multiple states - New York readers tapped in with more than 2200 reads and Michigan and Pennsylvania were not far behind.
We are not sure what happened here, but we do know the Google algorithm took over as the story’s popularity began landing it on the first page in searches for birds and winter.
It was a nice change.
“Typically in news is if it bleeds it leads is the general rule of thumb. Meaning that news which covers the darker side of humanity tends to get more views,” Goodwin said. “But what we see in this story is that positive news can win too. This happy little bird story has received over 80,000 views in the last few days! To me that speaks to our love for our backyard birds and how they speak to our child-like wonder.”
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