TakePart

» see takepart.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The films reached me and the website did not. An Inconvenient Truth was a thing you could talk about in Ankara in 2007. TakePart was the American back end of that same operation, the part that assumed you would go home afterward and look up your local representative. Nothing on it was built for anyone outside that assumption.

Participant Media was founded in 2004 by Jeff Skoll, who had been eBay's first president and came out of it with enough money to build a studio around a theory. The theory was that a film could be an organizing tool if you attached one to it properly. TakePart, from 2008, was the attachment: a website where the campaign for each release lived, and where you were supposed to land after the credits with something to do.

It did not stay a campaign page. Over eight years it turned into a working daily publication with staff reporters and standing sections on food and criminal justice. It also ran long reported projects with no film behind them at all: sixteen girls on six continents interviewed about being sixteen in 2016, a series on what happens to people coming out of prison. The Contagion campaign page alone pulled more than two million visits by the end of 2011.

It was journalism paid for by a marketing budget, and everyone involved knew that was the arrangement.

~ the record ~

~ the arrangement ~

The problem with being a studio's social-impact arm is that your funding is a line in somebody else's marketing plan. TakePart never had to sell subscriptions and never had to win a traffic fight it could not win, which is why it could pay reporters to spend weeks on deforestation. It also meant the whole operation existed at the pleasure of a film company's strategy, and film company strategies change on a schedule that has nothing to do with your publishing calendar.

There was a television version too. TakePart Live ran on Pivot, Participant's cable channel, from 2013 until it was canceled in December 2014 on cost grounds. That was the first signal that the brand was more expensive to run across formats than it was worth to the parent.

~ the actual end ~

On 21 November 2016 Variety reported that Participant was scaling the site back and that layoffs were coming. The chief executive called it a strategic move away from running a standalone site. The resources would go toward original video and toward formats like virtual reality, with a new product promised for 2017. The company would not say how many people lost jobs.

Publishing stopped at the end of December. In the first week of January 2017 the homepage was replaced with a note that read "Goodbye from TakePart", thanking readers for eight years and pointing them at a Participant newsletter. The navigation bar still worked, so for a while you could walk the whole archive under a farewell banner.

~ what happened to the archive ~

The site stayed up in that frozen state through 2018 at least, which is more grace than most media shutdowns get. Eventually takepart.com stopped being a site and became a redirect. Today it lands you on participant.com without a word about what used to be there.

Then the parent went too. Participant Media announced it was shutting down in April 2024, twenty years after Skoll started it. It left behind a shelf of Oscars and no working answer to how the impact arm was supposed to pay for itself. The website built to prove that movies could move people outlived none of it.

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