THREAD. Unfortunately the takeaway from my time at Subverse for some people will be the recent cat-astrophe (sorry). Despite the difficulties, I'm very grateful for the many lessons I learned and the work I was able to do funded by our audience. Here are some highlights:
One of the very first pieces I did for Subverse was on the Yellow Vest movement in France. I went back a handful of times to keep up with it because I was frustrated with the lack of media coverage in the US.
Covering the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong definitely had a huge impact on me as a journalist in ways a single tweet can't explain. I still follow HK news fervently and can't wait to go back. youtube.com/playlist?list=…
Totally by chance, we ran into the East Turkistan Awakening Movement in DC. At this point, a lot of people hadn't heard about what was happening to the Uyghurs. It was a great opportunity to learn more.
As someone fascinated by social movements, I jumped at the opportunity to go back to Barcelona to cover Catalan Independence protests. It was pretty intense.
I was really lucky to find and work with some incredible contributors from all over the world too
Like in Chile:
Lebanon:
France:
Thailand:
When we shifted to @SCNRbot during the pandemic, we focused our format solely on field dispatches and short docs (which is why a lot of old Subverse videos show up as private now).
This digital series DISTANCE paved the way for something much bigger.
This episode of REVOLUTION RETROPECTIVE was supposed to be the first part of a series about the Portland Uprising. I hope we can finish and publish the other parts soon.
This is only a taste of what our tiny staff got up to at Subverse/SCNR. There's a LOT that didn't make it out by the time we were deplatformed. Altogether, I don't think Subverse "failed", but it's a shame the actions of the least-involved person (the CEO) made it collapse.