Media Giraffe Quotes

"As far as what motivated us, it was not money. Money had absolutely nothing to do with it. It was a desire to build an online community based around a real place, where the people using the online community live in the place. And it was to start creating a way for grassroots journalism to flourish. It was so the stories in this town that The Reformer, which is a corporate paper, was not going to cover, got covered. And what what we discovered was that when you cover news at that grassroots level, you draw the attention of regular media. And so they then start scanning the site, every day, every other day, and when they see something interesting, they pick it up. So, in a way it is a really great way to bring news up that would otherwise simply not get out at all. Things that are embarassing to [town] board members, and various town boards -- things they don't want to talk about. And certainly points of view that are never going to be represented."
-- Lise LePage, iBrattleboro co-founder

"Bloggers are not exactly journalists, which is a mistake many people make. They expect us to be dispassionate and unemotional about topics such as occupation and war, etc. That objective lack of emotion is impossible because a blog in itself stems from passion - the need to sit for hours at one's computer, slouched over the keyboard, trying to communicate ideas, thoughts, fears and frustrations to the world." The blogger known as "Baghdad Burning" in an April 7, 2006 interview with an Aljazeera reporter

"Yes, we surely have thrown away some money that would have been nice to have. But it is highly worth it. I mean you think about the opportunity to maybe really put yourself -- or put this community -- on the map as being the founding place of this new industry standard whether it is the Village Soup-licensed product or five other versions of Village Soup. Or somebody’s even got a better version than we have, and a slicker way to get there ,or a cheaper way to get there or something, but that we would be identified as where this concept started."

"In organizing media makers the coalition seeks to provide a space to look critically at the NYC indepedent media movement and organize for increased resources for local communities and for media advocacy. The coalition will work to provide a format through which independent media makers can communicate, collaborate and strategize ways to increase awareness of community organizing campaigns through media making."
from NYC Grassroots Media Coalition website

“Only an interrogated executive is an executive that’s responsive to the people . .. I’m not about the glamour-journalism we have today . . . [I prefer] results to glitz.”
Scott Armstrong, in a Media Giraffe Project interview, April, 2006

". . . [P]eople who aren't very familiar with our work want to know if we're beholden to the DNC, the RNC, the FBI or the DMV. We're not. We are supported by our readers alone. And those readers are the only people to whom we're beholden. If I can point to one thing that defines Truthout - that makes us unique - it's that we have accepted these readers as our sole supporters. And while that interdependency may occasionally be a bit stormy, it guarantees that whatever issues arise will be worked out between our organization and the community that we serve. The corporate hand will never rule here." Marc Ash, in an April 2007 "About Us" statement.

"To me the defining qualities of family papers are rootedness -- a passionate commitment to place and to the people who live there -- and spending more on the paper. If the family gets that sort of payday rush from putting out a really good newspaper they will spend more on the paper . . . I would ask you to explain to me what is the objective view of lousy health care, poor schools, racial murder and injustice?"
H. Brandt Ayres, in a speech to a Sept. 2002 conference on family newspapers at the University of Ilinois, Champaign-Urbana

“The key is that you have really good content out there and you get it to the right people,” says Baldwin. “We distribute a lot of self-published authors, they do the publishing to promote what they do …we provide them distribution through the regular trade channels, but they’re out there selling through non-traditional channels.”

By participating, I’m learning by doing, examining issues and taking part in the process in the practices, and talking about advocating in academic work. [By] Learning about the complexities of them, I’m able to write and learn."
Andrew O'Baoill, in Media Giraffe interview (below)

"Experiences are ways of converting traditional news judgments from editors' definitions (what's most interesting, what's most important, what you can't believe just happened) to readers' definitions of how they react (what makes readers feel informed, what gives them something to talk about, what tells them the paper is looking out for their interests.)"
Anders Gyllenhaal, editor, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"I remember quite clearly the day Rocketboom had 700 regular audience members (December, 2004). 700 was a very big number for me - it still is - because it represents one of the largest, accessible playhouses in Austin that I was involved with. In any number of theaters, usually with less than 300 seats, I would easily spend an entire year of my life working on a production that would be a success to sell out even one or two nights for an entire 6 or 8 day run. In so many ways, there is no comparison between a play and an episode of Rocketboom and in another way, with Rocketboom, we now have well over 350,000 people per show."
Andrew Baron, commenting at his own blog on Rocketboom's growth
(photo by J.D. Lasica)

"I love journalism, I love the community. I feel like it is what I was born to do. I have been doing it since I was 8 years old. years ago. I love interviewing people. I love the give and take that you get. I believe in this new medium, I believe everyone was burned out on the mainstream press, everyone was burned out corporate journalism and there are now new possibilities with the technology to make it really better. So, yea -- it's an exciting thing to do every morning."
Paul Bass, in a Nov. 1, 2005 interview with the Media Giraffe Project

"Is Geraldo Rivera investigative reporting? In the O.J. Simpson case, were people standing outside doing interviews called investigative reporters because they were tracking down who the live-in babysitter was? Is that investigative reporting? I don't know. There may be some investigation involved and there may be some reporting, but I don't think it has much to do with keeping institutions or individuals accountable who have power and are not accountable. It doesn't have much to do with the old phrase "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable."
Lowell Bergman, in a Jan. 2001 interview at the site Journalism Jobs

"I want this to be a force for a democracy. I want us to be an honest broker, and I want newspapers featured on our site to get traffic from us. There's never been a more controversial time on the planet. I think it's great to be a news source at this point because there's so much hunger for news. You see a lot more diversity in the news coverage on our site than on others . . . Even if we did want to bias it, fundamentally we are committed so strongly to objectivity we couldn't possibly do it. I think no matter what political association you belong to, it's valuable to see what the other side is saying."
Kirshna Bharat, in a 2003 interview with PaidContent.org's Stacy Kramer (link below).

"We don't talk about ownership, we talk about stewardship. We talk about journalistic values, community service values, and expectations and make sure they understood the trust-like nature of the Blethen corporation, and that any financial expectations they might have for being a shareholder in Blethen were going to be pretty minimal . . . the family and the succeeding generation of family, it really is something in this day and age to go onto something which really is values based and really makes a difference in the community and does something special like journalism. It is very powerful."
Frank Blethen, in an August, 2006 MGP interview (see below)