Oh crap, another blog.
“Welcome to my blog.” I must have written at least half a dozen versions of this post before, but here we go again.
I built my first website in 1995. It was my “official” website (to distinguish from all the other Japhy Grant’s) and to put things in context, it was listed in the top 100 websites on the Internet by Mozilla (go ask your I.T. guy). Of course, there were probably only 102 websites on the Internet at that point.
Since then, I have blogged and created content for the web with varying frequency. After 9/11, I spent hours in the campus library sharing my reactions, thoughts and news about the new world we lived in through a blog I called “The Modern Romantic.” After moving to Hollywood to pursue a career in filmmaking and TV writing, I got caught up in writing for local gay magazines like IN Los Angeles and Frontiers. In time, I became Frontiers‘ Arts & Entertainment Editor and found myself writing for The Advocate, Out, Salon, True/ Slant and the New York Observer. My internet habit had become a career.
Two days after the 2008 election, I took over as editor of Queerty, then the web’s largest LGBT website. With Obama taking over the White House and Prop 8 passing in California, there was plenty to write about and I was waking up at 5 a.m. every day to pump out 4 major articles as well as 20-30 short blogs on any bit of news that I thought would interest Queerty’s readership. It was A LOT of fun. My mandate was to bring some level of original journalism to the “link to articles” world of blogging and along the way, I managed to tick off everyone in the gay community in one way or another. My new gig also started just as the economy was collapsing and it wasn’t a huge shock to find out that Queerty’s mother company was collateral damage. Six months after starting, I was out at Queerty and left with a choice: Do I stay in journalism or focus on what I came out to L.A. to do: Create entertainment?
I figured if I was going to choose between two dying industries, I might as well choose the one I loved, so I hung up my journalist hat and started taking jobs (any job) in Hollywood’s nascent web series industry. Internships became full-time positions and with an insider’s view of how the whole “Internet entertainment” game was shaping up, I produced my own web series and won a cool competition by Intel to “create the next big idea in digital entertainment.”
I now get to take many of these ideas and bring them to life through Fishbowl Worldwide Media. In January, we launched Petsami, a digital entertainment network for pet lovers and we have a few secret projects up our sleeves as well.
The thing is, while there are approximately 24 billion blogs on “social media strategy” on the Internet, there’s very few dedicated to using social and digital tools to tell stories. So, I says to myself, “Self, why not start a blog…again?”
Which brings us full circle. I am aiming for a post a week to begin with and will build up as needed. I’ve also gone ahead and taken as many of my previous blogs and integrated them into the new site. This is, after all, the “official” Japhy Grant site and while I mentally made a distinct break between my time as a journalist and my curent career as a digital entertainment producer, the truth is that both roles have informed and strengthened the other.
I love telling stories, be they true or made-up, digital or old-school and I like sharing my ideas and process with anyone who’s interested. That’s the idea behind The Format. I’ll give some professional insights on what makes a great web series, talk about how the medium of the web changes the kinds of stories that are told on it and also ask questions and give tips that you may or may not agree with. Other than this post, I don’t expect it to get terribly personal and while I may write about politics again someday, it won’t be here.
Hopefully, this will be a fun ongoing adventure into the future of digital entertainment and social storytelling that you and I can take together.
Got a question? Ask in the comments.
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