The first time I met him, I thought he was a little crazy.
Bright Blue eyes, very short hair, armed with a big smile, he comes to the Corbis office’s lobby on 20th street in New York City to welcome me for a job interview. He guides me through corridors to his big glass corner office commanding the newsroom. Everything is neat. No papers. A bare desk. Two big screens.
He has me sit down next to him facing his computer and starts talking really fast, too fast for me, my English is good but still a lot slower than my French. He doesn’t ask me any questions (odd for an interview), barely lets me say a word (is he just not interested? Does he have someone else in mind for this position?). He is walking me through every step of his strategy for the company but also for the photography industry. His passion is contagious. I am impressed and a little charmed.
He offers me a position in the entertainment division, but I want to work in the news division. We will not work together, at least not for now, it will take a bit more time and one of life’s many twists… but that’s another story, our story.
Brian Storm was born August 6, 1970 in Minnesota, from a father working in the steel industry and a mother who stayed home to take care of her children. They have his brother at 17 and Brian at 19. A sister would join them 7 years later.
After graduating from high school (one of the best moments of his childhood), he follows his older brother to the College of the Ozarks in Missouri on a baseball scholarship. From that time, Brian keeps a competitive edge but also a great team spirit.
He hurts his shoulder from throwing the ball too much and is sidelined for a while. Then comes his second passion, photographing sports for his college newspaper. His ultimate dream at the time is to become a Sports Illustrated photographer.
He is a good photographer, so good that he gets yet another scholarship, this time to attend the prestigious Missouri School of Journalism to study photojournalism in the graduate program. There again, two events will change the course of his studies. His college roommate is a programmer who introduces him to interactive CD-ROMs in 1993. And newspaper publishing frustrates him. He finds it crazy to spend a week with a family who has been victim of severe flooding, to have them open their house, share their lives and pains to then have only one image published at a quarter of a page on the front of the paper. What would appear to many as the consecration of a photographer constituted for him the betrayal of his subjects. A vocation is born: give the subjects of the photographs a voice by doing audio interviews. The perfect marriage.
Brian is crazy in love with his work. He works all the time. Early on in our relationship, he would often wake up in the middle of the night to answer e-mails, to my shock but also the one of many of his coworkers who would get 3 a.m e-mail messages. He was working every day of the week including weekends and would rarely allow himself even half a day. He tells me that when he was working in the Missouri media lab, it was worse. He was literally working night and day.
One day in 1995, two guys in suits knock on the door of the Media lab at the University of Missouri looking for Brian. They were from Microsoft, much to Brian’s surprise since he was an Apple fanatic and had never used a PC. He had hung a poster on the lab’s wall that read: “ Things you can do while Microsoft Word loads: Do your laundry, go to Shakespeare’s Pizza …”
“We are looking to build MSN News, one of the first major news web sites,” they said. “It will sit on 30 million desktops within a year.” The ability to reach that many people with stories that matter got Brian over his PC aversion quick. At 24, he became the Director of multimedia for MSN News, which would later become MSNBC.com. He was the 11th employee of the web site and stayed at the company for seven years. “It was like getting a PHD in multimedia,” Brian says. Amongst his great accomplishments there was the success of The Week in Pictures , a weekly feature showcasing the best and most important photographs of the week.
As much as Missouri shaped an ambition, MSNBC built Brian’s reputation as a visionary. He became a hot commodity as a man who not only understood the media world but was shaping what it would be like in the future.
After seven years at MSNBC, Corbis, one of the largest photo agencies in the world and another Bill Gates-owned company, makes him an offer he can’t refuse: to lead their entire editorial division globally including news, sports and entertainment as well as their archive, which featured the Bettmann collection. He would also take over and rebuild the assignment division with an eye on multimedia reporting and distribution for multiple platforms. At 31 years old, Brian left Seattle to take on New York City.
Corbis is appealing to him in that he would get to shape the coverage that most new outlets would be using. He spends a large part of his time there overhauling the infrastructure to be able to make more images available faster and built an ingestion and Digital Asset Management system that would link images to sales data. He and his team work on building a strong assignment division, featuring renowned photographers such as Lynsey Addario, Ed Kashi, Brenda Ann Kenneally, Stephanie Sinclair, Ben Lowy, Andrew Lichtenstein and Martin Schoeller to name a few. He starts setting the key elements in place for building a strong multimedia agency that would ultimately allow not just for the licensing of photographs but would package stories including audio and video as well.
I join the company to help run Corbis Outline for some of those years and there remain some of the most fun and instructive years in my career. There was an incredible team of people working hard and passionately. I would often go into the office on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon and find a good 20 people already there behind their computers pushing to create a better type of media company.
However, there are also political and strategic challenges and Brian’s role is “ eliminated ” after less than three years.
Although there were clear warning signs, this forced departure comes as a big shock to him. He still sometimes talks about it with sadness, the regret to not have accomplished what he feels was his mission there, that opportunity to have really improved the business of photography, the feeling to have let down many of the photographers he convinced to come on board, his friends, colleagues.
The time Brian takes to work through what he saw as a downfall proved key to his next step. After leaving, he spends nine months reading everything he finds interesting, surfing the net and meeting as many people as he can. He turns down several job offers and mulls over one of the biggest decisions of his life, starting, or more accurately reviving, his own company, MediaStorm.
Brian had started the first iteration of MediaStorm while he was in graduate school at the University of Missouri in 1994. At the time, they were publishing CD-ROMs. This time, the advance of web publishing would allow Brian to create his own publication.
He hires one of his best friends and long-time collaborator Robert Browman . Brian always said of Browman, an accomplished photographer/ multimedia producer/ programmer, “He is someone who can do and can learn anything,” the perfect partner in an endeavor where most everything is yet to be figured out.
The two of them constantly bounce ideas off of each other and debate over the philosophy of the company: They would publish long form journalism, projects that could not find a place anywhere else, that much is clear. Against my advice, Brian decides he would never adhere to a consistent publishing schedule be it monthly, quarterly, weekly or daily. “This is the internet. There is no need for a schedule. We will publish a project whenever it is ready, when we simply don’t have the skills to make it any better,” he would repeat. Another important part of their start-up philosophy: “We would work in our socks out of our apartment on 20th Street.” Socks remained the official uniform of the company through the years and different offices. “The only caveat, no holes.”
One of the most ambitious of their early projects is “ Kingsley’s Crossing ,” Olivier Jobard’s story following an illegal immigrant every step of his perilous journey from Cameroon to Europe. Kingsley’s Crossing is the story of one man’s dream to leave the poverty of life in Africa for the promised land of Europe. We walk in his shoes, as photojournalist Olivier Jobard accompanies Kingsley on his uncertain and perilous journey (see the film at http://mediastorm.com/publication/kingsleys-crossing).
Brian always asks to see the whole take from the photographer. In this case, Jobard has 6 months of photography to look through, all contact sheets and negatives. Jobard scans over 750 images for the final 21 minute film and is back to interview Kingsley about his journey. All stills except for the video interview, this is the first piece to win the Emmy for outstanding documentary on the web.
The company grows to 8 employees, working all day and night. And at some point he and I move our personal life out of what has become more an office than a home –I’m sure also to the relief of many of the MediaStorm employees. So many talented people have worked there, most who left would go on to have a huge impact in the industry: from Chad Stevens who is now teaching the top multimedia program at the University of North Carolina, Jacky Myint , a designer on the game changing Snow Fall project for the New York Times, and Pamela Chen now the Editorial Director of Instagram. Of course there are those that have been part of the fabric since the very early days: Eric Maierson , Tim Klimowicz and Tim McLaughlin who have helped define so much of what MediaStorm is.
Through the 10 years, there are many successes : more Emmys, two duPont Awards, important work for clients such as National Geographic , Reuters , the Council on Foreign Relations , Starbucks , Alexia Foundation and the Harbers Foundation , revenue growth, staff growth, and a move to offices in Dumbo, a burgeoning tech triangle in Brooklyn, NY.
Brian is a perfectionist. He likes to own the full experience. Not satisfied with the playback options he is getting from YouTube and Vimeo, he decides to build his own video platform and player that allows embeds, subscriptions and transactions. MediaStorm begins to license the player to other organizations like the Sundance Institute.
Brian is also someone who cares deeply about the industry. Teaching has always been a big part of his career and from the very early days, I remember him traveling extensively to talk at conferences and teach workshops to the next generation of storytellers from Kalish to Eddie Adams. Once again, he brings that passion home and launches the MediaStorm workshops where he not only teaches photographers and filmmakers how to gather video and edit but also teaches educators to update their curriculums and media executives how to start similar businesses by giving them an inside view of his methodology , much to his board’s and my dismay.
“At the core, Brian’s mission has always been about doing the right thing, in many ways, at the expense of profit. He often says: “Money is an enabler, not an end.” Although there are many day-to-day challenges in running the company and there have been sacrifices: many nights with him staying up worried about the future, contributors, employees and clients. Many weekends when he worked rather than hang out with me or the kids. Many times where he turned away more money or comfort in the name of integrity. Despite it all, he is living the dream, his dream of running an ethical and uncompromising media business. The dedication to this dream has allowed this small company with people working in their socks to compete with the largest media companies in the world and lead the way in web publishing.
The truth is Brian is indeed a bit crazy and incredibly stubborn but that is a great part of the foundation of his success and definitely has something to do with his charm… But that again is another story…
Elodie Mailliet Storm
INFORMATION
http://mediastorm.com
