Information Warriors

Web Expanded
Click here for a link tothe Guerilla News Network website.

Empowered by the digital video revolution, Guerrilla News Networkis trying to revolutionize the way news is produced anddisseminated.

For GNN’s first NewsVideo, The Diamond Life, co-founderStephen Marshall traveled to Sierra Leone to document the civil unrestin the small African nation as a renegade military group sought tocontrol 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 toeyewitness reports, the RUF rebels, led by dismissed Sierra Leone armycorporal Foday Sankoh, were mostly young boys between the ages of 8 and16. Armed with AK-47s, Russian assault rifles, and rocket-propelledgrenade launchers, the rebel youths attacked civilians — liningthem up and gunning them down, hacking them to death with machetes, andtorching their houses.

The incident made international headlines and was featured on dailynews reports in many Western countries, including the United States.The Western press framed the rebel attack around greed and the battlefor diamonds, Sierra Leone's chief export. After a while, though, thestory disappeared from the evening news and the atrocities faded frommemory. But the fighting continued.

About a year after the incident in Sierra Leone, Josh Shore got acall from musician Peter Gabriel. Shore, who at the time was working asa producer for MTV, had spent the majority of his young broadcastcareer pitching alternative news programs to various networks withlittle success. His pet project at the time was a collaboration withStephen Marshall, the writer, producer, and director of 1996'sChannel Zero, a documentary “video magazine” shot onHi8 that combined an ambient, electronic musical score with headyinterviews about unbalanced reporting in the mainstream news media. Theidea was to follow Marshall's Channel Zero model to create shortnews documentaries about current events and set them to a soundtrack ofcontemporary, beat-driven music to appeal to a young, hip audience.

The duo pitched the idea to several networks, all of which turned itdown. Even MTV — the perfect demographic — rejected theidea. Convinced that no mainstream network would ever embrace theirradical programming, Shore and Marshall toyed with the idea of takingtheir concept to the Web.

“We wanted to use video to tell stories of the planet, and noone would let us do that,” Shore says. “TV is based onratings, so the notion of a news program where fearless reporters aresent out into the world with their video cameras just wasn't going tofly.”

Before the pair could get a website off the ground, Shore's fatherbecame deathly ill and Shore returned home to Montreal, where he andMarshall had graduated from the same high school. Back in Montreal, thephone rang.

“The Web had just started to explode,” recalls Shore,31. “Everyone was IPOing — all these young people in themedia, people my age. But I was paralyzed because I couldn't go forwardwith the project because my dad was so sick. Then one day, out of theblue, I got the call from Peter Gabriel, who had heard about ourconcept 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 Ican help.’”

CopWatch, a GNN NewsVideo, turns the “Bad Boys” themefrom Cops on its ear as an activist group documents policeofficers’ activity and exposes possible oversights andbrutality.

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 arrivedfrom Sierra Leone. A journalist with the Sierra Leone BroadcastingService, Deen was one of the first reporters to expose the atrocitiescommitted by the RUF. After living in exile with his wife and two sonsin his homeland, Deen eventually fled Sierra Leone and made his way tothe Witness offices in New York. It wasn't long after that Deen wassitting in front of a camera recounting his horrific tales to Shore andMarshall.

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 ofnews documentary with music video. Released in fall 2000, theseven-minute video is a history of the civil war in Sierra Leone.Produced in conjunction with Witness and featuring instrumental musicdonated by Gabriel, the video contains graphic scenes of dismemberedheads and human entrails. The music alternately punctuates thesehigh-impact scenes and then recedes as United Nations officials,political commentators, and Deen describe the RUF's decade-longcampaign of terror against the citizens of Sierra Leone.

The Diamond Life, which can be viewed, along with other NewsVideos, at www.gnn.tv,helped established GNN's formula: The video contains expert interviewsand a musical bed by a top recording artist; it covers an issue thatthe GNN staff considers important and underreported by the mass media;and it seeks to expose any and all unethical corporate and/orgovernment ties that may be at the heart of the issue. (In TheDiamond Life, DeBeers, which controls roughly two-thirds of theworld's diamond supply, according to the report, is implicated becauseit allegedly bought diamonds from the RUF, thus prolonging thecountry's civil unrest by supporting the rogue military group.)

In subsequent NewsVideos, GNN has reported on corporate control ofthe hip-hop music business — When the Smoke Clearz, cut toDead Prez's “Hip-Hop” — and the CIA's role insmuggling drugs from Nicaragua into America — Crack theCIA, set to a loop by DJ Trek-e.

“We're clearly antiestablishment,” says Shore, who hasproduced many of GNN's 15 NewsVideos. “We're guerrillas in theculture, but in the news realm rather than the geopolitical realm. Theway we acquire the news is guerrilla — people running around withdigital video cameras getting the information for themselves ratherthan relying on the big media outlets to feed it to them.”

Because of GNN's grass-roots approach of gathering and disseminatinginformation and its antiestablishment messages, Marshall compares thenetwork to counterculture movements of the past. “It's videoproduction, but on its most basic level it's a movement much like yousaw in the '60s. It's counterculture,” he says. “In oursmall way, in this preliminary state of our company, we're trying tocompete with the established media companies like CNN.”

For The Diamond Life, GNN documented the Revolutionary UnitedFront’s decade-long military campaign against the country’sgovernment and citizens.

Indeed, it's no coincidence that GNN sounds much like CNN.“Having a name that rhymes with CNN helps people project what weare,” says Shore. “It allows us to be positioned andperceived as a news network.”

Ironically, after Channel Zero and before GNN, Marshall wasrecruited by CNN CEO Tom Johnson to critique the network and help itattract younger viewers. What Marshall came up with was a $300-millionproposal for a start-up, youth-oriented channel that ultimately fellthrough when Time Warner purchased CNN and Turner Broadcasting Systemin October 1996. After parting with CNN, Marshall continued to look foran outlet for his ideas while growing increasingly frustrated with theway major broadcasters like CNN tried to repackage their news foryounger audiences.

“They think that by flashing as much information as possibleon the screen they can attract younger viewers,” says Marshall,34. “But it's cynical to believe that by altering the cosmeticpresentation you'll attract a younger audience. One of the best ways toattract those viewers is with something that at least approaches powerwith a skeptical and critical eye. And because there's so littlesubstantive, investigative reporting being done in the mainstream newsmedia, it has given us the opportunity to step into thatrole.”

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 theirlegions of online followers as the West Coast Bunker, the house is notonly the nerve center of GNN, it's also home for Marshall, GNN producerIan Inaba, Inaba's girlfriend, and Switch Technologies, an IT andweb-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 afreelance writer and producer for MuchMusic USA, a cable music spinoffof Canada's MuchMusic. Lappé and Inaba met Shore and Marshall whenthe 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 neverlaunched. Before the start-up crashed, Lappé and Inaba were ableto funnel some production money to Shore and Marshall for TheDiamond Life. After Polyverse failed, Lappé and Inaba joinedGNN.

Released in January 2000, Countdown marked the unofficiallaunch of GNN.tv. The NewsVideo includes political commentary byRalph Nader remixed by Ad Rock of the Beastie Boys.

“All of us spent our early careers in the do-it-yourself-TVworld where you shoot it yourself on small formats,” saysLappé, GNN's executive editor. “We've always been searchingfor ways to do highly charged, political stories and make themattractive to younger viewers. The Internet has given us the chance todo exactly what we always wanted to do.”

Of the four people working on the GNN staff, no one receivessignificant remuneration, and only Marshall works full-time on materialfor the website. As creative director and the primary video editor onstaff, he's responsible for fashioning the unique look of GNN'sNewsVideos: multiple layers and lots of CG images and Flashanimation.

With GNN's latest video, a 30-minute documentary calledAftermath that has been released in several installments overthe last few months, Marshall has created a look that he hopes to mimicwith future NewsVideos. “We're trying to create something thatdistinguishes us from other news networks,” says Marshall.“In many ways our limitations have propelled us into a newfrontier.”

Inside the West Coast Bunker, Marshall edits on two Apple Final CutPro systems running on G4s. One of the systems is a single-processorunit, where all the off-line work is done. On the dual-processormachine, 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 twodesktop systems, Marshall has a G4 laptop with Final Cut Pro. Like theediting stations, all of the servers and storage necessary to operatethe website are courtesy of Inaba's company, Switch Technologies.

Inside GNN’s West Coast bunker, Ian Inaba (left) and StephenMarshall plot the future of Guerrilla News Network. Photo by digitalphotographer Jake Lawrence.

In addition to doing all of the editing work, Marshall shoots mostof the content for the NewsVideos, which rely heavily on talking-headshots of scholars and expert sources. His primary camera is a Canon GL1MiniDV camcorder, although he occasionally uses a Sony DCR-TRV20 forB-Roll footage. To get the footage into the G4s, he has two Sony DSR-20DVCAM recording decks connected to the edit stations via FireWire.

While Marshall admits that he dreams of having the latest andgreatest video equipment, in particular Panasonic's AG-DVX100 24pMiniDV camcorder, he says technical limitations and workarounds havehelped define the look of GNN's NewsVideos. In part two ofAftermath, which is about the failure of the U.S. government'sstandard operating procedures following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,Marshall considered getting a stock footage shot of an F-16 fighterplane taking off, but instead downloaded an image from the Internet andanimated it himself in After Effects.

“At the time I wished I had that footage, but thank God Ididn't because we'd be just another CBS or CNN if I did,” hesays. Of course, with so much of the videos left to Marshall'sinvention, the post process can be very time-consuming. Marshallestimates that he spends 300 to 400 hours editing every three minutesof video. For Aftermath, on average, he produced one minute ofvideo every week.

Fortunately, all the hard work is not without reward. Crack theCIA, a NewsVideo that investigates the CIA's involvement in drugsmuggling, won the Short Subject Audience Award — one of twoawards given (the other Audience Award is for animation) — at the2002 Sundance Online Film Festival. Marshall plans to enterAftermath this year. He also plans to enter WhiteAmerica, a music video that GNN created for Eminem's song of thesame 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 twoApple G4 workstations running Final Cut Pro. Photo by digitalphotographer Jake Lawrence.

Although the NewsVideos are GNN's showcase product, print storiesaccount for 90% of the material on the website. As executive editor ofthe site, Lappé is responsible for much of the print content,including the NewsWire section. He calls upon a variety of watchdoggroups and independent writers — all of whom contribute to thesite 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 abouta lawsuit against Coca-Cola that Marshall says no one in the mainstreammedia would touch until he broke the story on the GNN website. After itwas posted, there was great interest in the story. With 250,000 uniqueviews, it instantly became GNN's most popular story when it wasreleased in April 2001.

“During that story we went from having 30 people on our site aday to 300 and then to a thousand,” says Marshall. Today thewebsite generates between 9,000 and 10,000 unique views daily and about150,000 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 sitehave more than a casual interest in reading the NewsWire and monitoringthe 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 tothink someone isn't watching the site — they probably feel prettycomfortable with what we're doing.”

Nevertheless, Inaba has to wonder if there hasn't been some effortto interfere with the website. He says GNN's servers have gone down inthe past because of hackers, and there have been problems with phonelines and attempts to discredit some of GNN's writers. Still, theguerrillas are undaunted.

“In reality we have nothing to hide and there's nothing tofear when you're speaking the truth,” Inaba says. “And allthe stuff we're reporting is out there. It's just not put into a largercontext by mainstream news sources. That's all we're doing.”

Although GNN came a little late to the Internet party and missed outon the millions of investment capital dollars doled out by Wall Streetin the late '90s, its creators insist that the site has never beenabout making money.

“We didn't go into this trying to meet any numbers. We wentinto it to make hot videos and unleash information,” says Shore.GNN has never accepted advertising on its site. “This is along-term project. We're not trying to IPO this. If someone has to geta [paying] job for awhile, then they'll go get a job.” To makeends meet, Shore consults with companies on web-development strategiesand occasionally works as a TV producer in New York City.

Shore admits that if even one show had successfully migrated fromthe Internet to television, it would have drastically changed thelandscape of the Web. “The assumption is that everyone makingmedia on the Web is making crummy media,” he says. “Butmost of those websites that failed were started by non-media makers.They were started by bankers. We started this with tangiblemedia-making skills.”

But even with those skills, Shore understands that GNN wouldn't bepossible without inexpensive digital video technology. “That'sexactly what's enabled us to do this,” he says. “All youneed is a $1,000 camera, a $10 tape, and a steady hand and you canchange the world.”

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