Starting in May 2004, award-winning photojournalist Olivier Jobard spent six months documenting the journey of Kingsley from Cameroon to France. The original award-winning piece was first published on MediaStorm in July of 2006, and was recently syndicated by MSNBC to be included as part of a story about The Changing Face of Europe. On the site, Kingsley’s story is presented in five sections and includes an interview with Jobard about the risks involved in documenting Kingsley’s epic journey.

Many of the stories being produced for MediaStorm.org are also being licensed for publication in other places. I asked Brian Storm to give us a little insight into how that’s working and what they’re doing.

Q: How do you syndicate a multimedia piece? What does that mean?

Storm: Our goal is to get stories seen by as wide an audience as possible, so if we can take advantage of the of clients, those who have large audience reach, to get more exposure, that’s great. Sometimes we produce stories originally for MediaStorm – right now, we’re producing a project that we believe in and when it’s done we are going to auction it. The winning bid will get two weeks exclusive rights, then it will come back to MediaStorm.org and we may syndicate it again. We’re not looking to do things that are exclusive to MediaStorm, we’re looking to create a media blitzkrieg, and get stories out on as many platforms and in as many mediums as possible. We want to stretch the value of the reporting.

For Kingsley’s Crossing, Jobard spent 6 months on the project. While his images are incredible, the story aches for more context. That’s where the video interview and music come in and provide a richer, cinematic experience.

Q: Do you ever license the stories as you produce them, or do people want to do their own thing with the content?

Storm: Projects we’ve licensed- Friends for Life, Iraqi Kurdistan, Kingsley, Never Coming Home– ran exactly as we’d produced them. Sometimes the publication will add other content or divide our presentation into chapters, but they’re generally taking the production as was originally produced.

Q: When you work with photographers to produce stories for MediaStorm.org, do you actively try to syndicate them, or do you just want people to come to your site?

Storm: We’re pretty active in our efforts to create as much exposure as possible for our projects and that’s not limited to MediaStorm.org. When we start a project we have multiple clients in mind for the end product. Best case, you create something of real value, some exclusive content that helps separate one publication from another. If we can produce the highest-end content, and then allow clients to bid against each other for the right to publish the project, it’s good for everyone. It helps separate one publication from another with exclusive content, and for us and the photographers, it drives the value of that exclusive content up.

Q: Do you see MediaStorm.org ever publishing projects photographers produce on their own?

Storm: We aspire to get there with as many contributors as possible. We don’t want to have to produce everything that’s on the site. It’s hard work! “New York Reacts” and “It Ain’t Television… It’s Brain Surgery” came to us ready to go, we basically just had to encode them. Ray Farkas is amazing. We’d love to be working with more people like that.

We definitely want to see other people producing; that’s why we give away how-to guides on our site to help people get started. We hope to become the platform people showcase their work on – if someone has a really great project, we’d love for them to come to us so that we can help distribute it. We don’t just syndicate the projects, we also work to generate revenue around them – selling books, links to the music and licensing of images, the whole package.

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