What would you ask, if you could ask the world?

Draft in the founder’s voice, built from his 2022–2024 writing and the tape. Under review by Maceo, sentences in quotation marks are his, verbatim, and link to where he said them.

Before now I never envisioned myself running a newsroom. This started as a podcast I made to contribute something to the music industry, and that podcast is how I built the network, the community, and the archive that We Them Media is now built on. What I learned in web3 shifted what it was for. “Originally conceived as a podcast, things have shifted-- as my journey into the realm of Web 3.0 has taught me the importance of prioritizing community over content creation.” That sentence is from September 2022 and it is still the shortest version of how We Them Media happened.

Here is the problem as I see it. Almost everything you know about a place you have never been reached you through somebody else’s edit. It came filtered, summarized, and reordered before it got to you, by people and now by machines that never asked the person it was about. Ask a question about a country you have never set foot in and watch what comes back: an answer in seconds, confidently written, from sources you cannot inspect, about people nobody talked to. You lose the ability to act on any of it, because you cannot tell what is true.

The thing I keep coming back to is that “the victors are the history books.” So this time we should do our work and archive from all sides. That is the whole idea.

What is missing is the footage. Enough video made by people who live where the story is happening that anyone can check a claim against a face. Enough of it to put communities in front of each other who would otherwise never meet. Make enough of that and people can act on what they can finally see.

We make videos from and for communities whose stories are most often told extractively, by outsiders passing through a place they don’t share, or not told at all.

There’s a pattern behind that extraction. It’s colonial, neo-colonial, and corporate, and we don’t pretend it isn’t. Colonialism in particular is the biggest unwritten story of contemporary media. We treat it as a lens through which other stories get told. George Floyd needed colonial context to be told justly. Biafra needs it. Land and economic questions in Kenya carry the long shadow of British settler structures, even when the day’s news looks unrelated. Eviction in Charlotte needs colonial-and-corporate context. Most outlets leave that context out. That’s how communities end up dehumanized and decontextualized in the same breath. We don’t.

The work is led from Africa and the diaspora. White collaborators and other allied voices join the network on the same anti-extractive terms. Where you come from matters here. It is not a test you pass or fail. The question we ask anyone joining us is whether they treat the people in their videos as partners or as objects.

The network is anchored in Africa. That’s where most of our contributor base lives and where the founder has spent the most time on the ground. The immediate work is to show the model holds in Nigeria, Kenya and Ethiopia, then expand. We’re not committing to a second continent before the first one is properly anchored. The English-speaking diaspora is already part of the work. Expansion comes in stages.

The team is split across continent and diaspora, from Lagos and Abuja to Nairobi to Philadelphia, and everyone is named on the masthead. The audience: people who want to understand somewhere they don’t live, from someone who does.

The work is free to access. No paywall. No advertising. The audience we earn is the audience we owe.

WTM sits on the same shelf as independent host-led media, Lex Fridman, Channel 5, Zane Lowe, Afropolitan. The closest comparison is Channel 5, which films from an American vantage. Our contributors film from Africa, the diaspora and the U.S. We put those places in conversation with each other. We’re not in the same lane as legacy hard-news outlets and we’re not trying to be.

Everyone reports from somewhere. A newsroom that claims to stand nowhere is standing somewhere and not saying so. We say where we stand. The work is led from Africa, made with the diaspora, and filmed by people in the places they live. Put enough of those vantages side by side and you get a truer picture than any one of them alone. We don’t apologize for that. Saying where you stand is more honest than claiming you stand nowhere.

We don’t just cover communities. Coverage leaves when the story does. What we are trying to leave behind is the capacity to keep filming.

How it works: One Question is the programme. Somebody on their own street answers a question on camera before they walk away. Contributors across the network film them in the places they live. Anyone can also post a question to the platform and attach money to it, and storytellers close to that question pick it up, film it, and earn the bounty on delivery. We retain the strongest contributors at the end of each season as lead voices for their regions. Funding flows through mechanisms you can see: recurring support through Fractured Atlas, our fiscal sponsor, and open bounties on poidh where every question and every payout is public. Readers can see what they’re paying for and contributors can see what they’re being paid in. WTM holds editorial direction. Not by funders. Not by token holders. Not by partners. The conversation all of this produces is the point.