A MediaStorm workstation

 

MediaStorm's 2007 News & Documentary Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary for Broadband ("Kingsley’s Crossing," by Olivier Jobard. Also nominated that year was MediaStorm's "Bloodline: AIDS and Family," by Kristen Ashburn)

That's true as well, of course, of the phenomenon called "citizen journalism," to use a too-ennobling phrase for – and thank goodness for the exceptions – bloggers who "report" hearsay, rumor, unverified claims, facts without context and inexpert analysis.
 
MediaStorm is having none of that. The nearly 15-minute "Intended Consequences" –  (http://mediastorm.org/0024.htm) in which impregnated survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and war-rape speak over photos and video about their lives and their children – is by no less a light than Torgovnik, the celebrated Newsweek photographer. The 16-minute "The Marlboro Marine," co-branded with the Los Angeles Times, takes photographer Luis Sinco's famed Iraq War image of a weary fighting man with a cigarette dangling from his lip and gives real-life subject Corporal James Blake Miller a forum to reveal the truth behind a  picture politically hijacked for propaganda purposes. The 13 1/2-minute "The Ninth Floor," a study of junkies who formed a de facto dysfunctional family squatting in a Fifth Avenue apartment, is renowned photographer Jessica Dimmock's own adaptation and audio expansion of her same-name book.
 
Such heavy hitters are contributing, says Storm, because among other things, even famous photographers and photojournalists can have trouble getting their images and stories out in any meaningful way. Are they making money from their MediaStorm pieces? That's hard to say – MediaStorm is privately owned, and at this point, it's about getting the model down.
 
"I'm not trying to make revenue per se off the site," Storm maintains. "I'm trying to make revenue other places," such as producing and syndicating pieces for some of the aforementioned clients. "I  could drop in advertising anytime," he says, and some Google AdSense ads do appear, below the fold, as they do all over the Web. Otherwise, "It's sort of the crack cocaine philosophy," he jokes. "You get 'em hooked first and add advertising later. We're tying to build audience now."
 
How he's doing that illustrates what may be the key aspect of the model – way-efficient leveraging of bloggers, social media and Web interconnectivity in general.
 
"So this link over here," he says, pointing to a "Link to us" button on the page for "Common Ground," (http://mediastorm.org/0023.htm) by Chicago Tribune photographer Scott Strazzante, "takes you to [a page with] multiple versions of the [title] graphic and the embed code," so that a blogger, for instance, can link to "Common Ground" with an attractive, high-gloss image as simple as 1-2-3-copy-paste.
 
"We know bloggers – frankly, they're lazy," says Storm. "They need the materials and they want to make a post. So we give them everything they need to do that. I spend no money on marketing – it's all word of mouth, viral, blog posts."
 
 And he covers, as they say, the waterfront:
 
    * YouTube: The panoply of MediaStorm clips there includes a minute-fifteen trailer for "Intended Consequences," (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqaOYV3ykPQ&feature=PlayList&p=54B62CE625BEF775&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=1) followed by  promotional links. "This is how we're getting awareness. Of course we're on Vimeo, My Space – this is what I mean by platform-agnostic, I don't care where you see it, I just want to get exposure."
 
    * Hulu, the TV-show download site: "We raised $12,000 in a single week from [a 30-second] PSA [public-service announcement]. Our goal is to put 1500 kids through secondary school through the charity Foundation Rwanda. (http://www.foundationrwanda.org/)
 
    * Facebook: "The big one, the granddaddy of traffic driving. So I'll post that picture on my Facebook page, and everybody on my network can click on the share button. And then it spreads. Thirty-five hundred Facebook-friends all over the world now subscribe to MediaStorm as fans."
 
    * Miscellaneous: "Twitter has become the #11 driver of traffic to our Web site in four months. Of course we have a blog, but what's important about that is it generates our RSS [Real Simple Syndication] feeds, which gives us 34% of our traffic. Another big growth thing for us is mobile – this is the fastest-growing way people are watching offerings. We also have a Mac [computer] widget, so you hit  F12 on your Mac, you get your widgets to come up. Ironically, we've [also] gone backward: We offer DVDs. Colleges asking  to show our products in classrooms where they don't have an Internet connection need a DVD. We take the money via PayPal. It's really seamless."
 
"This is new," Storm says of such organized, grassroots distribution, which goes beyond the obligatory, pro forma efforts of, say, Hollywood studios who toss a Facebook page up for a movie, then move on two weeks after the film's released. Storm speaks with a gospel tongue when he marvels at "this ability for me to spread something through a 400-person personal network and say, 'You should watch this.' This surge of connectivity is journalism's greatest hope."
 
Storm – whose staff includes two multimedia producers, two interactive designers and a project manager, with a couple more producers on call – was born in Anoka, Minnesota, and at 7 moved to Detroit with his family, which includes an older brother and a younger sister. Ten years later, joined his brother at College of the Ozarks in rural Missouri, playing baseball for The Bobcats. Realizing he would not, however, go pro, "I found photography and started shooting a lot, and ended up going to the University of Missouri for grad school," getting his master's degree in journalism in 1995.
 
"I'd wanted to be a sports photographer – that's what I know, that's what I loved," Storm remembers. But once at U of M, he met fellow photographers who "started showing me their work and then telling me their back stories and the contexts of their pictures, and I was, like, 'Holy smokes!' I was a really good photographer, but I felt the world didn't really need another photographer – the world needed somebody who can help get these stories out there."
 
To do that, he founded MediaStorm in 1994 while in grad school, where he otherwise stayed busy teaching electronic photojournalism and producing CD-ROMs. The following year, he says, "Microsoft came through recruiting, and I ended up taking a job with MSN News. A year later we became MSNBC.com. I spent seven years there as director of multimedia, responsible for audio, video, photography and interactive applications" for the Web site. "It was kinda like my PhD in multimedia storytelling."
 
He moved to New York City in 2002 to spend two years as vice president of news, multimedia & assignment services for the photo and digital media agency Corbis, owned by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Then, "In late 2004, I got fired from Corbis, which is kind of a long story but a good one, and took a couple of months off and thought, 'What do I really want to do?' And what I really wanted to do was bring MediaStorm back."
 
His new-media company harkens back to old media – not in the way early TV harkened back to vaudeville (variety shows), theater (live drama) and radio (the verbal acrobatics of Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, et al., on stages or bare sets); those were the simply the most logical models for the new medium, the same as early fiction movies, or "photo plays," began as filmed stage productions before Griffith, Eisenstein and others began developing motion pictures' own vocabulary. MediaStorm, conversely and perhaps inevitably at this early stage, piggybacks not on old media's aesthetics, but its economics. Pieces not produced for clients such as National Geographic are generally spin-offs of previous work. The roughly 3 1/2-minute "Never Coming Home," for instance, about American families who lost sons in the first Iraq War, was made by radio producer Zac Barr and photographers Andrew Lichtenstein and Tim Klimowicz, who separately were doing a radio story and a magazine story, funded by their respective old-media companies. "I put 'e m together and made a new product," says Storm,
 
Those new products are crossbred creations that, while playable in linear form on DVD, are best appreciated on the Web, where their amalgamated still photography, audio and video (and occasionally even Super8) are framed with interactivity – from simple commenting to drilling down through interactive maps, to contributing to a charity, to distributing virally.
 
And that last may be just what journalism needs: an evolutionary way of getting news features out to a public that buys fewer and fewer newspapers and watches less and less of network newscasts. There's a danger to such niche-oriented segmentation, like in the story about six blind men describing an elephant – each knows only his segment and doesn't see, so to speak, the big picture. Yet that was equally true when the magazine market segmented from such general-interest publications as Life, Look and Collier's to increasingly specialized titles. And even here, some general-interest magazines, like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, continue to exist. Barring the complete collapse of newspapers in print or on the Web, general-interest news sources will almost certainly remain to give us the whole elephant. And professional, high-quality interactive journalism may become both the gateway to that elephant and a whole new creature itself.
 
"At some point, people have to stop saying that MediaStorm is the future," Storm insists. "Because the reality is we are real. We are the present" – not the future, but an amazing simulation.

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