YAHOO! NEWS UNDERGROUND

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I created and hosted the featured, solo-journalist series Underground for and under contract to Yahoo! News. Their audience at the time dwarfed that of all other news outlets — online, in print or on TV — with 50 million unique monthly viewers. Underground’s own “circulation” rivaled that of Vanity Fair (insane, I know) with @ 750,000 unique monthly views.

I created all Underground content at first — copywriting, articles, photos, video. I also managed social integration — a new concept in the early days of YouTube and Facebook. Eventually, Didrik Johnck joined me as field producer, adding serious photography, video shooting and editing skills, and lessening my workload.

Super talented Josh Payton (Huge, UK) designed the site, generously incorporating elements from my “pilot” site American Subculture (below). Also, my exec producer insisted I write songs to accompany my videos as I had done in the first clips under his supervision. Dirk Ward arranged and produced all them and more. He, and also Dan Mackenzie, wrote additional tracks. Here’s one of those vids with original music I wrote and recorded — Earth to SciFi Fandom:

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AMERICAN SUBCULTURE

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Starting from writing its deliriously fun proposal, I did everything on American Subculture, the Yahoo-commissioned prototype for Underground. I built the website and supplied all its content, including shooting and editing “pilot” videos for episodes on Swingers and Machinema. (See the Swingers clip below. And yeah, that’s some weird-ass taxidermy behind the unlikely founder of the “lifestyle” movement.)