Purple States is a dynamic new media company that transforms the best features of digital and established media into an original and valuable synthesis. Purple States taps into the raw energy, the unfiltered authenticity, and the dynamic interactivity of user-generated content on the web, and distills this diffuse material into the story of a group of ordinary people covering the news Ð a story with the coherence, high production values and watchability associated with traditional media. Purple States has pioneered people-powered broadcast-quality news coverage on television, the internet, and mobile platforms. During its first two seasons, Purple States has aired weekly documentary series on NYTimes.com, washingtonpost.com, Verizon V-Cast, and local television.
In January 2009, a new team will go to Washington with the new President and the new Congress, to cover the first hundred days of the new administration for major news platforms, both domestic and international.
As Purple States moves into 2009 and beyond, we are developing programming on various news stories that lend themselves to people-powered coverage. The website currently features a series called 50/50: fifty bloggers from fifty states in fifty days, in edited video-blogs that tell a cross country story about the economy. Purple States is also in discussion with cable networks about longer-form documentaries, including topic-specific series (immigration; housing; water), and a lifestyle series based on a purple premise.
The members of each Purple States team are carefully selected to reflect the range of demographic and other characteristics appropriate to the season's programming, whether that is election coverage or how the economic crisis looks from Main Street. They bring the depth of their own life experience to their interpretation of the news and their relationships with each other. The viewer gets to know and comes to care about them.
The members of the Purple States team are citizen journalists, but not in the usual sense. They are not isolated man-on-the-street videographers, but members of a systematically deployed team who travel together to report on news from the frontlines. Their journey is professionally filmed and edited, and aired on a variety of major media platforms. Purple States is reality news: The Real World meets The Huffington Post.
During the first two seasons, the Purple States cast included a 24-year-old florist - now college student - from Iowa, a laid-off manufacturing professional and libertarian from New England, a 33-year-old Baptist mother of three and teacher from South Carolina, a gun-carrying Cuban-American art gallery director from Florida, and a grandfather from Southern California who works for AT&T and lives with his Mexican-American son-in-law.
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