""This is, I think, the sixth time [I've] come here," the woman's public comment to the Corpus Christi City Council begins. She is wearing a full-body cockroach costume, antennae and all. "Last time, I brought you a bag of dead roaches. Some of you were offended, so this time, I'm bringing you a live one." This 51-second clip is a perfect example of the IRL Parks-and-Rec hilarity buried in public meeting recordings from communities across the country."
"The clips are anywhere from a few seconds to three minutes long; Rajaraman said the Hamlet team is still experimenting with the ideal length. Most clips have around 1,000 views on YouTube Shorts, give or take a few hundred. The three top-viewed videos there to date are a taxpayer demanding removal of a sign-in sheet (35,000 views); a Lincoln resident asking the city to " remove the name 'boneless wings' from our menus and from our hearts" (22,000 views);"
Hamlet curates short, humorous clips from public meetings to spotlight eccentric, often viral moments from local government proceedings. The company aims to use humor as a civic engagement tool and position itself as a C-SPAN for local government. Hamlet launched an Apple TV app in December but prioritizes TikTok and YouTube Shorts, with plans to surpass 1,000 subscribers on both platforms. Posted clips run from a few seconds to about three minutes as the team experiments with length. Most clips draw roughly 1,000 YouTube Shorts views; top examples range from 35,000 to over 400,000 views across platforms.
Read at Nieman Lab
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