Guerrilla News Network

» see gnn.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

GNN was an argument between Americans about American media, conducted in English on an American schedule, and I was not part of that argument at any point. It reaches me now the way most of the anglophone political web of the 2000s reaches me, as an archive capture with a date on it.

Guerrilla News Network, Inc. was founded in 2000 by Josh Shore and Stephen Marshall, with an office in New York City and production facilities in Berkeley. The stated mission was to expose people to important global issues through cross-platform guerrilla programming, which in practice meant a website and a film unit operating under one name. It ran for nine years.

The website is the part worth keeping. GNN.tv gave every registered user a blog page, took original article submissions from anyone, hosted a forum, ran collaborative investigations and accepted reader photography and video. Nine years in, the header on the site still read GNN 2.0 Beta, and nobody running it appears to have minded.

~ the dossier ~

~ the voting floor ~

Submissions had conditions. A piece had to be wholly original and sourced, and it had to arrive with a photograph or an illustration attached. Then it went to a vote. Readers decided what appeared, and a submission that did not clear the bar stayed on its author's own page until it did, which meant nothing was rejected so much as left sitting in public.

The weighting is the detail everyone forgets. A user's vote counted for more the more they had been published on the site, so editorial power accumulated to whoever had already written things that worked. Digg was running a flat ballot in the same years, one account one vote. GNN had built the opposite machine, a front page controlled by its own veterans, and almost nobody copied it.

~ the films ~

The short films came first and traveled furthest. Crack the CIA, about agency involvement in the drug trade of the 1980s, took a prize at the 2002 Sundance Online Film Festival, and another short covered genetically engineered food. Two feature documentaries followed, including BattleGround, which the site carried a banner ad for through 2006. Ian Inaba, who worked at GNN as a director and journalist, made the video for Eminem's Mosh.

~ the quiet part ~

On 2 August 2009 the archive took two copies of gnn.tv, and both are the real site: about eight and a half kilobytes of headlines, user blogs, cropped article thumbnails and a shop link. That is the last working capture there is.

The crawler did not come back for six months. When it did, on 6 February 2010, the homepage was six hundred and eight bytes. No press release exists and neither founder explained it anywhere. A spam site took the domain over some time afterward, which is what usually happens next and is the less interesting half of the story.

~ what the stylesheet was called ~

The tombstone page is worth reading as source. It is valid HTML 4.01 Strict and it loads two stylesheets, and the entire body is one element: an italic line reading "and all is quiet...". The second stylesheet is at the path /closed/adios.css. Somebody sat down, wrote a goodbye page, filed it in a directory called closed, named the file adios, and then did not put a word of explanation in it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

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