Quite a lot of the publishers involved in the Brick House command a lot of respect in this industry, and have been working on issues of press freedom and speech rights for a long time.
The cooperative goals are well stated on your Kickstarter site (here), but if you succeed in moving forward, how will any decisions be made? We took a lot of trouble over the bylaws.
The nine publishers have to meet and vote on forward steps, and if consensus can’t be reached we refer the matter to the Advisory Council for a recommendation.
That being said, we have a group of people whose interests are strongly aligned, and who are willing to take a significant risk on this experiment.
You have some prominent names on the advisory council with links to main stream media. Do you think this will work for, or ultimately against the project?
Yes, we are very proud of our Advisory Council, which consists of Emily Bell, head of the Tow Center; Anna Holmes, founder of Jezebel; Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review; the dean of labor reporters, Hamilton Nolan; Gabriel Snyder, former editor of Gawker and The New Republic; and Paul Ford, writer, editor and CEO of Postlight.
Most industry leaders are agreed that the time for a new model, for experiments and innovation, is now.
We anticipate and indeed hope that the dialogue between mainstream and experimental media strategists will be lively and robust. That can only lead to good things.
Do you foresee policies put in place in the future for members in legal trouble with oppressive regimes?
For now we’re focusing on just getting The Brick House off the ground–but this has long been an area of focus for me as a journalist and publisher.
Will membership come with a code of conduct required of members
Yes. There is a code of ethics that forms part of the operating agreement, to which all members must agree
It covers things like plagiarism, making good-faith efforts to verify what is published, things like this.
So there are mechanisms in place to remove ‘bad apples’ should any emerge.
