YouTube Clips Unveil Oakland Shooting

[Joanne98]

In the still evolving YouTube era, videos don't just spread, they rally a community.

Consider the unrest over the fatal shooting of Oscar Grant III.

At about 2:15 a.m. on New Year's Day, Grant, 22, a supermarket worker, was shot by Johannes Mehserle, 27, a transit police officer, at a subway station in Oakland, Calif. Handheld video-enabled cameras and cell phones at the ready, alert witnesses at the scene caught the shooting and the moments that preceded it from different angles. In one of their videos, an onlooker yells at a woman recording the scene: "Put it on YouTube!" Local and national television stations have aired and re-aired excepts from the raw and grainy videos, which have taken on a new life online. They're being commented on, edited and, in one disturbing, stylized, two-minute video, set to music. Uploaded on Jan. 3, that YouTube video has been viewed more than 60,000 times, and drawn nearly 450 comments.

By 7 p.m. Thursday -- more than a week since the incident -- the top-ranked story on YouTube's news page was the Oakland shooting.

One of the most watched YouTube videos is a clip that originally aired on news channel KTVU, the FOX affiliate in the San Francisco Bay Area. Viewed 179,000 times, the four-minute news segmentfeatures two videos taken by onlookers that night.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/08/AR2009010803582.html?hpid=moreheadlines