It started with an unusual police report heard by the late night editors on The Free Press copy desk. Sometime around 11:30 p.m., a Mankato resident called police to report that two very young girls in their pajamas were walking along Carney Avenue north of Riverfront Drive, and, they had a goat with them.
The story gets better. When police stopped the girls they said they were simply taking their goat out for a late-night walk. They couldn’t remember their address, but they knew how to walk home, so the officer was obliged to follow.
By this time, the story had made all the police radio chatter and there were reportedly several other officers who drove by to see what must have been classic scene: their fellow officer escorting the two young girls and their goat. Apparently many cell-phone pictures were snapped. (This is yet to be confirmed part of the story, but we’ll use a little journalistic license.)
The girls spun their tale thicker as they went on. They were hiding their goat in their closet because mom had bought it but dad wasn’t going to be too happy about it once he found out.
Of course, eventually, police determined the girls had taken the goat from the Sibley Park zoo after hatching the plot earlier in the day when they were at Sibley Park for a birthday party.
As is likely to happen these days with such a bizarre and funny tale of a goat-napping, once the story made The Free Press website, it went viral.
This story was made for the modern-day, multi-platform media world we live in. It likely went viral from The Free Press Facebook site, as the 2,000 or so people who are fans on the site likely forwarded it to their Facebook friends. If 2,000 Free Press fans have 10 friends each, we’ve just expanded our audience for this story by 20,000. If they have 100 friends each, the story expands by 200,000. And then those friends forward it to their friends and hence the “viral” nature of the story is developed.
Our Twitter posting and link to the story was also being “retweeted” around the globe. It was on the Drudge Report and in the Washington Post, as well as other media sites everywhere including USA Today and CBS Radio.
According to the last count, the story had been looked at 78,376 times, by almost 60,000 different users who spent an average of 3 minutes 48 seconds reading the story. And that’s just on The Free Press website. There is no accounting for how many times it was viewed on hundreds of media sites around the world.
The Associated Press picked up the story as well, and people commented on the story on The Free Press Facebook page from Tasmania, Australia to Melbourne, Fla.
The comments varied from readers appreciating the humor and cuteness of the story to those suggesting the parents should be charged with neglect.
Clearly, it’s a story right out of Mayberry R.F.D. and maybe that’s what gives it so much appeal. Nothing horrendous happened to the girls. In an age where we hear and see so much brutality, this story seems to have given people a little bit of hope that there is still innocence in America.
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