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Jack Douglass, YouTuber of the Year!


Over the weekend of April 14, our son Jack won a prestigious award for his work as a YouTuber – a “Shorty” award for YouTuber of the Year. It’s an honor that recognizes his contributions as an entertainer and his success: Jack’s channel, www.youtube.com/jacksfilms,  recently topped 4 million subscribers, putting him in the top echelon of YouTubers. He recently posted his 1,000th video and has received more than 1.6 billion views since launching his site in 2006.

I’m proud of Jack’s success, but I’m especially proud of how he has achieved it.

In school, Jack was really good at math, and I assumed he would major in math in college and get a job in that field. But Jack had other ideas. In high school he made a video for a school project, and that was it. He fell in love with video, and any thoughts of a math career were in the rearview mirror.

It took a lot of courage to decide to try to make a living making videos, then moving to California where he knew one person – YouTuber and videographer Joe Anderson, who took Jack under his wing and helped him get his start.

I helped Jack with his move to the West Coast. In truth, I helped him find an apartment in what turned out to be a very sketchy neighborhood in Korea Town (note to self: don’t base your assessment of a neighborhood by touring it on a Sunday morning – all neighborhoods look safe then). I reasoned that Jack would want to be near a subway stop, and the place we found was in walking distance to the Mid-town stop. Being familiar with the Metro system in Washington, D.C., I thought people would use it to get to work, travel to the many interesting places in L.A., and so on. In Korea Town, the station was a hangout for drug dealers and ne’er-do-wells.

Jack survived that year and found a new place in a better area without my help, and he has thrived in L.A. ever since.

Jack has succeeded by being funny (much harder than it seems), being a perfectionist as an editor, and working very hard – to keep up with social trends, adapt his content to remain relevant, compose his own music, meet grueling deadlines. Most important, he engages his audience, gives them a voice, and is kind.

 Congratulations, Jack!



Comments

  1. Inkblot April 15, 2018 at 9:33 PM

    hell yeah.

    ReplyDelete
  2. smoov22April 15, 2018 at 9:52 PM

    Congratulations!

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownApril 16, 2018 at 10:08 AM

    I never thought you were so proud of your son, beautiful post Dave.

    ReplyDelete
  4. UnknownApril 16, 2018 at 12:44 PM

    He deserved that award! Best YouTuber ever!

    ReplyDelete
  5. UnknownApril 16, 2018 at 2:32 PM

    I am a huge fan of your son, and you must be really proud of him.
    Ask him for a cameo on the channel later! Tell that his fam squad is asking for ;)

    ReplyDelete

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