Huffington Post for the Occupy Crowd? [View all]

http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/04/occupy-com-website-launch


From left: Occupy.com cofounders Seth Adam Cohen and David Sauvage, manager Samantha Pastor, and social media editor Justin Wedes. Photo by Alex Fradkin

New York filmmaker David Sauvage is cofounder of Occupy.com, a nonprofit multimedia and news-aggregation site that launches today with financial backing from Hollywood, lots of complicated internal politics, and a plan to become a must-read for a new generation of activists. "There is so little in the media that the vast majority of people engage with that is alive, or powerful, or truthful, or messy, or complicated, or real," says Sauvage, 31, whose last project before joining Occupy Wall Street was a TV commercial for WSJ, the glossy magazine of the Wall Street Journal. "I would like to see the makers of content emerge as the shakers of the world."

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That might sound like a tall order, but Sauvage has already seen the movement reward his ambitions. In October, he made a slick promotional video about Occupy Wall Street, then raised $7,000 on a crowd-funding website to air it on several cable channels, including a segment of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor. The spot caught the attention of Larry Taubman, a 61-year-old African-American film producer, who wanted to work with Sauvage on other Occupy-themed videos.

"I'd been waiting for when that next generation was going to arise and basically reclaim their future," says Taubman, who splits his time between a Seattle law practice and his Beverly Hills film production company, which has worked with celebrities such as Danny Glover and Morgan Freeman. At the time, Taubman was buying pizzas and raincoats for Occupy Seattle but was eager to do more.

Instead of another commercial, however, Sauvage pitched him on going in together to acquire Occupy.com. Taubman's jaw dropped at the domain name's asking price, but he eventually snatched it up for a large confidential sum and kicked in another $130,000 in seed money. "It was very clear that the Occupy movement needed a way in which it could speak for itself, and without having to do it through the lens of other media," says Taubman, who has given Sauvage's crew of six editors total control over the site's content. "The reason that we are in existence is that we want to show the world who we are."