Skip to main content

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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jack and Erin's Wedding!

This past weekend Jack married Erin Breslin in Santa Barbara. Erin is smart, sassy, strong, funny, and beautiful. She and Jack are nearly inseparable, and when they are together, they talk and laugh nonstop like two school kids. As Donna noted in her beautiful, heartfelt remarks at the rehearsal dinner, it's hard to know what they have left to talk about after carrying on this continual conversation for more than three years. It is obvious to anyone who sees them that they are head over heels in love. Donna and I had met Erin's parents last December in Philadelphia. We immediately became friends and found that we shared a lot of common values -- particularly the importance of family. It was great to see them again in Santa Barbara and to meet their son Gerard and many of their siblings and in-laws. It also was great to meet some of Jack's fellow YouTubers. There's a culture of camaraderie in the industry, and many of them were eager to help Jack when he was g...
3 comments
Read more

Paris In the Spring

Donna and I just returned from a week in Paris – and it was spectacular. France hadn’t been on my bucket list. First off, there’s the whole foreign language thing. Not my forte, in the same range that brain surgery isn’t my forte. Then there's the reputation of French inhospitableness, particularly toward Americans. If I’m not wanted, don’t worry, I’ll stay away. Finally, I imagined it as a snooty, glitzy, high-end-fashion kind of place – you know, movie stars, swimming pools – out of my comfort zone. We ended up going to fulfill a dream of Donna’s: Not so much of seeing Paris (she had done so years ago on a high-school trip), but of seeing Yundi Li, a 40-year-old Chinese pianist, give a performance there. The language barrier turned out to be manageable. Donna took eight years of French in school and was using Pimsleur to bone up. I started using the online app too – though at the introductory level. In real life, I could have gotten by without Donna’s near fluency because mos...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Childhood Paradise

When I was five our family moved to a neighborhood in Rockville that would become a Paradise for me.  Our new home was on Leverton Road, the southernmost street in Hungerford, a suburban tract development of modest single-family houses. 800 Leverton Rd. Two attributes made my childhood home special: One was that the sprawling neighborhood of a few hundred homes was built all at once and filled with families, like ours, with kids, so I instantly had playmates by the dozen. The second advantage was that within walking distance were my elementary school and a rec center with a ball field; a community pool and a fantastic park that were built a few years later; and, best of all, dense woods on three sides of us and winding, long trails throughout them. We spent as much time outdoors as possible .  Nobody I knew stayed inside much unless they were sick or being punished. We found plenty of things to do.  We were among the first people to move in, so ther...
4 comments
Read more