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MillimeterInformation Warriors
Jan 1, 2003 12:00 PM, Cody Holt
Web Expanded
Click here for a link to
the Guerilla News Network website.
Empowered by the digital video revolution, Guerrilla News Network is trying to revolutionize the way news is produced and disseminated.
 For GNN’s first NewsVideo, The Diamond Life, co-founder Stephen Marshall traveled to Sierra Leone to document the civil unrest in the small African nation as a renegade military group sought to control the country’s diamond trade. |
On Jan. 6, 1999, armed rebels from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) invaded Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. According to eyewitness reports, the RUF rebels, led by dismissed Sierra Leone army corporal Foday Sankoh, were mostly young boys between the ages of 8 and 16. Armed with AK-47s, Russian assault rifles, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, the rebel youths attacked civilians — lining them up and gunning them down, hacking them to death with machetes, and torching their houses.
The incident made international headlines and was featured on daily news reports in many Western countries, including the United States. The Western press framed the rebel attack around greed and the battle for diamonds, Sierra Leone's chief export. After a while, though, the story disappeared from the evening news and the atrocities faded from memory. But the fighting continued.
About a year after the incident in Sierra Leone, Josh Shore got a call from musician Peter Gabriel. Shore, who at the time was working as a producer for MTV, had spent the majority of his young broadcast career pitching alternative news programs to various networks with little success. His pet project at the time was a collaboration with Stephen Marshall, the writer, producer, and director of 1996's Channel Zero, a documentary “video magazine” shot on Hi8 that combined an ambient, electronic musical score with heady interviews about unbalanced reporting in the mainstream news media. The idea was to follow Marshall's Channel Zero model to create short news documentaries about current events and set them to a soundtrack of contemporary, beat-driven music to appeal to a young, hip audience.
The duo pitched the idea to several networks, all of which turned it down. Even MTV — the perfect demographic — rejected the idea. Convinced that no mainstream network would ever embrace their radical programming, Shore and Marshall toyed with the idea of taking their concept to the Web.
“We wanted to use video to tell stories of the planet, and no one would let us do that,” Shore says. “TV is based on ratings, so the notion of a news program where fearless reporters are sent out into the world with their video cameras just wasn't going to fly.”
Before the pair could get a website off the ground, Shore's father became deathly ill and Shore returned home to Montreal, where he and Marshall had graduated from the same high school. Back in Montreal, the phone rang.
“The Web had just started to explode,” recalls Shore, 31. “Everyone was IPOing — all these young people in the media, people my age. But I was paralyzed because I couldn't go forward with the project because my dad was so sick. Then one day, out of the blue, I got the call from Peter Gabriel, who had heard about our concept through one of his guys at Witness [for information on Witness, see “Reliable Witness” in Musings, page 98]. He said ‘I love what you're doing. I love the concept. Let me know how I can help.’”
 CopWatch, a GNN NewsVideo, turns the “Bad Boys” theme from Cops on its ear as an activist group documents police officers’ activity and exposes possible oversights and brutality. |
Not long after, Shore's father died, and Shore returned to New York. On the same day he arrived back in the city, Aroun Rashid Deen arrived from Sierra Leone. A journalist with the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Service, Deen was one of the first reporters to expose the atrocities committed by the RUF. After living in exile with his wife and two sons in his homeland, Deen eventually fled Sierra Leone and made his way to the Witness offices in New York. It wasn't long after that Deen was sitting in front of a camera recounting his horrific tales to Shore and Marshall.
The Guerrilla News Network (GNN) was born.
The Diamond Life was Guerrilla News Network's first “NewsVideo,” a term that embodies GNN's unique mixture of news documentary with music video. Released in fall 2000, the seven-minute video is a history of the civil war in Sierra Leone. Produced in conjunction with Witness and featuring instrumental music donated by Gabriel, the video contains graphic scenes of dismembered heads and human entrails. The music alternately punctuates these high-impact scenes and then recedes as United Nations officials, political commentators, and Deen describe the RUF's decade-long campaign of terror against the citizens of Sierra Leone.
The Diamond Life, which can be viewed, along with other News Videos, at www.gnn.tv, helped established GNN's formula: The video contains expert interviews and a musical bed by a top recording artist; it covers an issue that the GNN staff considers important and underreported by the mass media; and it seeks to expose any and all unethical corporate and/or government ties that may be at the heart of the issue. (In The Diamond Life, DeBeers, which controls roughly two-thirds of the world's diamond supply, according to the report, is implicated because it allegedly bought diamonds from the RUF, thus prolonging the country's civil unrest by supporting the rogue military group.)
In subsequent NewsVideos, GNN has reported on corporate control of the hip-hop music business — When the Smoke Clearz, cut to Dead Prez's “Hip-Hop” — and the CIA's role in smuggling drugs from Nicaragua into America — Crack the CIA, set to a loop by DJ Trek-e.
“We're clearly antiestablishment,” says Shore, who has produced many of GNN's 15 NewsVideos. “We're guerrillas in the culture, but in the news realm rather than the geopolitical realm. The way we acquire the news is guerrilla — people running around with digital video cameras getting the information for themselves rather than relying on the big media outlets to feed it to them.”
Because of GNN's grass-roots approach of gathering and disseminating information and its antiestablishment messages, Marshall compares the network to counterculture movements of the past. “It's video production, but on its most basic level it's a movement much like you saw in the '60s. It's counterculture,” he says. “In our small way, in this preliminary state of our company, we're trying to compete with the established media companies like CNN.”
 For The Diamond Life, GNN documented the Revolutionary United Front’s decade-long military campaign against the country’s government and citizens. |
Indeed, it's no coincidence that GNN sounds much like CNN. “Having a name that rhymes with CNN helps people project what we are,” says Shore. “It allows us to be positioned and perceived as a news network.”
Ironically, after Channel Zero and before GNN, Marshall was recruited by CNN CEO Tom Johnson to critique the network and help it attract younger viewers. What Marshall came up with was a $300-million proposal for a start-up, youth-oriented channel that ultimately fell through when Time Warner purchased CNN and Turner Broadcasting System in October 1996. After parting with CNN, Marshall continued to look for an outlet for his ideas while growing increasingly frustrated with the way major broadcasters like CNN tried to repackage their news for younger audiences.
“They think that by flashing as much information as possible on the screen they can attract younger viewers,” says Marshall, 34. “But it's cynical to believe that by altering the cosmetic presentation you'll attract a younger audience. One of the best ways to attract those viewers is with something that at least approaches power with a skeptical and critical eye. And because there's so little substantive, investigative reporting being done in the mainstream news media, it has given us the opportunity to step into that role.”
Mission control for the Guerrilla News Network is a two-story, four-bedroom house on a quiet, residential street in Berkeley, Calif., not far from Cal-Berkeley. Known to the four GNN staffers and their legions of online followers as the West Coast Bunker, the house is not only the nerve center of GNN, it's also home for Marshall, GNN producer Ian Inaba, Inaba's girlfriend, and Switch Technologies, an IT and web-development company that Inaba runs with four other people.
Anthony Lappé is the fourth and final member of the GNN staff. A graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, Lappé is a freelance writer and producer for MuchMusic USA, a cable music spinoff of Canada's MuchMusic. Lappé and Inaba met Shore and Marshall when the pair were putting together The Diamond Life. At the time, Lappé and Inaba, who attended high school together in Berkeley, were working for Polyverse, a youth-culture website that never launched. Before the start-up crashed, Lappé and Inaba were able to funnel some production money to Shore and Marshall for The Diamond Life. After Polyverse failed, Lappé and Inaba joined GNN.
 Released in January 2000, Countdown marked the unofficial launch of GNN.tv. The NewsVideo includes political commentary by Ralph Nader remixed by Ad Rock of the Beastie Boys. |
“All of us spent our early careers in the do-it-yourself-TV world where you shoot it yourself on small formats,” says Lappé, GNN's executive editor. “We've always been searching for ways to do highly charged, political stories and make them attractive to younger viewers. The Internet has given us the chance to do exactly what we always wanted to do.”
Of the four people working on the GNN staff, no one receives significant remuneration, and only Marshall works full-time on material for the website. As creative director and the primary video editor on staff, he's responsible for fashioning the unique look of GNN's NewsVideos: multiple layers and lots of CG images and Flash animation.
With GNN's latest video, a 30-minute documentary called Aftermath that has been released in several installments over the last few months, Marshall has created a look that he hopes to mimic with future NewsVideos. “We're trying to create something that distinguishes us from other news networks,” says Marshall. “In many ways our limitations have propelled us into a new frontier.”
Inside the West Coast Bunker, Marshall edits on two Apple Final Cut Pro systems running on G4s. One of the systems is a single-processor unit, where all the off-line work is done. On the dual-processor machine, Marshall does his online and all of his motion graphics work. He says he uses Adobe After Effects to generate some of the graphics, but most of the work is done in Final Cut Pro. In addition to the two desktop systems, Marshall has a G4 laptop with Final Cut Pro. Like the editing stations, all of the servers and storage necessary to operate the website are courtesy of Inaba's company, Switch Technologies.
 Inside GNN’s West Coast bunker, Ian Inaba (left) and Stephen Marshall plot the future of Guerrilla News Network. Photo by digital photographer Jake Lawrence. |
In addition to doing all of the editing work, Marshall shoots most of the content for the NewsVideos, which rely heavily on talking-head shots of scholars and expert sources. His primary camera is a Canon GL1 MiniDV camcorder, although he occasionally uses a Sony DCR-TRV20 for B-Roll footage. To get the footage into the G4s, he has two Sony DSR-20 DVCAM recording decks connected to the edit stations via FireWire.
While Marshall admits that he dreams of having the latest and greatest video equipment, in particular Panasonic's AG-DVX100 24p MiniDV camcorder, he says technical limitations and workarounds have helped define the look of GNN's NewsVideos. In part two of Aftermath, which is about the failure of the U.S. government's standard operating procedures following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Marshall considered getting a stock footage shot of an F-16 fighter plane taking off, but instead downloaded an image from the Internet and animated it himself in After Effects.
“At the time I wished I had that footage, but thank God I didn't because we'd be just another CBS or CNN if I did,” he says. Of course, with so much of the videos left to Marshall's invention, the post process can be very time-consuming. Marshall estimates that he spends 300 to 400 hours editing every three minutes of video. For Aftermath, on average, he produced one minute of video every week.
Fortunately, all the hard work is not without reward. Crack the CIA, a NewsVideo that investigates the CIA's involvement in drug smuggling, won the Short Subject Audience Award — one of two awards given (the other Audience Award is for animation) — at the 2002 Sundance Online Film Festival. Marshall plans to enter Aftermath this year. He also plans to enter White America, a music video that GNN created for Eminem's song of the same name, in the annual FlashForward festival for Flash movies.
 GNN creative director and co-founder Stephen Marshall (left) collaborates with producer Ian Inaba at one of the network’s two Apple G4 workstations running Final Cut Pro. Photo by digital photographer Jake Lawrence. |
Although the NewsVideos are GNN's showcase product, print stories account for 90% of the material on the website. As executive editor of the site, Lappé is responsible for much of the print content, including the NewsWire section. He calls upon a variety of watchdog groups and independent writers — all of whom contribute to the site without pay — to post a new story five days a week.
In fact, it was a print story, not a NewsVideo, put GNN on the map. Authored by Marshall, “Coca Karma” is a 10-part story about a lawsuit against Coca-Cola that Marshall says no one in the mainstream media would touch until he broke the story on the GNN website. After it was posted, there was great interest in the story. With 250,000 unique views, it instantly became GNN's most popular story when it was released in April 2001.
“During that story we went from having 30 people on our site a day to 300 and then to a thousand,” says Marshall. Today the website generates between 9,000 and 10,000 unique views daily and about 150,000 a month.
Because of the controversial and political nature of GNN's content, there's always the possibility that some of the visitors to the site have more than a casual interest in reading the NewsWire and monitoring the message boards.
“We have not been directly contacted by anyone yet,” Inaba says. “Then again, we operate in a very open environment. So if anyone is watching the site — and I feel hard-pressed to think someone isn't watching the site — they probably feel pretty comfortable with what we're doing.”
Nevertheless, Inaba has to wonder if there hasn't been some effort to interfere with the website. He says GNN's servers have gone down in the past because of hackers, and there have been problems with phone lines and attempts to discredit some of GNN's writers. Still, the guerrillas are undaunted.
“In reality we have nothing to hide and there's nothing to fear when you're speaking the truth,” Inaba says. “And all the stuff we're reporting is out there. It's just not put into a larger context by mainstream news sources. That's all we're doing.”
Although GNN came a little late to the Internet party and missed out on the millions of investment capital dollars doled out by Wall Street in the late '90s, its creators insist that the site has never been about making money.
“We didn't go into this trying to meet any numbers. We went into it to make hot videos and unleash information,” says Shore. GNN has never accepted advertising on its site. “This is a long-term project. We're not trying to IPO this. If someone has to get a [paying] job for awhile, then they'll go get a job.” To make ends meet, Shore consults with companies on web-development strategies and occasionally works as a TV producer in New York City.
Shore admits that if even one show had successfully migrated from the Internet to television, it would have drastically changed the landscape of the Web. “The assumption is that everyone making media on the Web is making crummy media,” he says. “But most of those websites that failed were started by non-media makers. They were started by bankers. We started this with tangible media-making skills.”
But even with those skills, Shore understands that GNN wouldn't be possible without inexpensive digital video technology. “That's exactly what's enabled us to do this,” he says. “All you need is a $1,000 camera, a $10 tape, and a steady hand and you can change the world.”
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