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I Want to Make Media that Matters

Private lessons in community media

When I first started the path into media, I was an idealistic guitar playing teenager that wanted to become an Audio Engineer by trade and eventually a Music Producer. The jobs in that field rapidly disappeared as I graduated from a certificate program in Los Angeles, then everyone was a producer. I moved to Portland 13 years ago to earn my Associates Degree while exploring the most indie town in the world. I joined KBOO Community Radio, where I hosted, produced, or engineered hundreds of broadcasts, and was a key-holding member of the Engineering Committee.

The deepest caveat to working in progressive community media is the lack of reach and technical capacity. Anti-capitalism can really hurt the opportunities they purport to provide people, as people still need money to survive, as studios need money to remain current. What drove me out of there was the lack of financial mobility and the highly contradictory politics within the so-called community. I watched the Chief Engineer get fired as part of an orchestrated coup to which I wrote a letter to the Board about. No action. It was another seething bureaucracy.

My criticisms are personal and I don’t want to discount the fact that I depend on community media to provide the content that I care about.

My years have doubled since I was that lonesome teenager hacking websites on Geocities, yet I am still hacking websites. If you go back even further, in Santa Barbara, I was a kid making movies with a camcorder. I organized sleepovers as movie productions. I even wrote scripts to ensure that we could finish a shoot in one day. We had at least three recurring series and characters going at one time. And I think I might still be trying to get back to those years, to produce at the level of creativity I had when I was just twelve years old.

I didn’t take the profitable path in life. I wasn’t guided that way, not effectively. Maybe it never would have worked for my personality type, pursuing the corporate ladder. In my life, I’ve pursued music, was a private investigator, became a non-profit president, arts festival founder, freelancer, IT tech, handyman, and contractor. I have a liberal arts education. After everything, media still feels like the predominant force for me.

Thru.Media is now an indie social media site and will evolve into one with a specific purpose: to socialize the editorial process. If Indie Media and its producers don’t take matters into their own hands, capital will force all the unique sites to integrate completely with Facebook. This is already rolling out and it will continue to grow over the next few years.

I for one would rather be among the Davids fighting Goliath on this media landscape.

A new social media you most likely have not heard about is the Buddypress platform. Developed by WordPress, it enables any blog owner to offer user communities. I installed here, at THRU. The hope is that content is conceived, organized, published, and critiqued transparently right there. If we achieve a few hundred users, that would be great. Because we’ve banned advertising on the pages, there is no motivation to farm a user base or to get more and more traffic, at all costs. The motivation is organic growth linked to trustworthy content.

Multimedia will be sponsored, like documentaries and podcasts, but within the medium itself. If no ads are running on the pages, then revenue is sharply lower than a common blog, but the user experience is smoother, cleaner, and more secure. Subscriptions will be asked for and that is how we will pay out the personnel who contribute writing for the blog.

For this model to work, our content will have to shine out the clickbait garbage with integrity and originality. Real profits must be earned with products and services. That makes THRU a creative agency ipso facto, not just a publication with social media tools.

I for one would rather be among the Davids fighting Goliath on this media landscape. Almost nobody is offering something with truly fresh thinking. I’m not sure if I am, but all I know is that I care deeply about it. That’s all that matters, originality comes from innocence.

I listen to NPR or watch PBS and I think I’m hearing a mouthpiece for neoliberalism. I cannot watch CNN, Fox, or local television news without becoming irate. The dialogue is anti-informative. Even Associated Press began to look like a mouthpiece to me, and they proved me right with their whole “Hillary just won the nomination” stunt which was not news, it was speculation. We have new means for broadcasting the arts, sports, movies, news, and yet most of us apply our talents toward the very gatekeepers I’m railing against.

“Social Media” needs to refer to an actual social process toward the production of media. We cannot reasonably regard selfies and memes as media. But we can socialize the editorial process and make real steps toward a new paradigm. And I admit that I do this out of anger for the corporate agenda, but I will always urge you to be as angry as you should be. Then do something creative with that.

A community media for profit is what I offer. Anyone can submit a post and work with an editor, while anyone can use our network to contact the contributors and editors. If we can find the means to monetize this site without succumbing to the trickery of the gatekeepers, then THRU will share that resource fairly, evenly.

I am sick of being misled by corrupt editors. I am tired of the objectification of the oppressed. I am tired of a top down social-economic order. I am tired of propaganda. I am tired of people arguing over moot points and turning politics into a personality showcase. I am tired of controlled access to information for profit. I am tired of being held down entirely by the will of the established order. Media is their tool, so I’m taking it into my own hands.

THRU is my site and I’m opening it up to become our site. Let’s see what we can do together.

Sean Ongley

By Sean Ongley

Co-Founder of THRU Media. A background in non-profit, music, and radio preceded my ambitions here. Now, I aspire to produce new media and publish independent journalism at this site and beyond.

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