Name: Jason Kristofer / Folkert Gorter

Age: 32 / 28

Location: Los Angeles / Amsterdam

URLs:
www.newstoday.com
www.quorporation.com
www.neurk.com
www.superfamous.com

Who are the main people behind the concept of Newstoday?
Folkert Gorter and Jason Kristofer

How did it all begin?
We were sitting in our usual spot on the 50th floor of the Wall Street Tower, NYC, that housed our companie’s offices at around 8:30 in the morning like we always did. We used to come in early, drink coffee, play some pool, enjoy the view of the city and talk about things we liked and the stuff we were working on. This particular meeting lasted a bit longer than usual, because somewhere along the conversation, while discussing the Quality by Quantity process that we were experimenting with at the time, things started to fall into place, and the basic concept of what newstoday is today was layed out.

What if you would put millions of like-minded individuals into one place and made every single one look into the same direction? What would happen? So we tried; put down some bare essentials for functionality, found people to help out with the back-end we needed, put down a quick page layout and took it for a spin. Disaster struck just as hard as success happened: the millions of people in our theory actually showed up. There was chaos, fighting, beauty, art, crime, love, hate, terrorism, sabotage, idealism, respect, inspiration, and everything else parallel to a small blue planet drifting aimlessly through space carrying masses of semi-intelligent life-forms, all trying to live together. And there was us not having a clue what was happening.

What were you hoping to achieve with Newstoday?
We got tired of seeing design portals decide what was good design, and felt that through this kind of filtering it left no room for our “community” to grow in different directions. If you wanted to be known within this community you had to abide by what was considered “good”, according to the places that just so happened to have the target traffic at the time. Our plan: Power to the people. We wanted to create an audience that any artist or designer could present their work to. No more restrictions like personal tastes, likes & dislikes and opinions of moderators running popular portals. Our audience is generated by people wanting to hear “design-news” from the horse's mouth, i.e. the "Celebrities" in the scene, i.e. the people leading this scene and the trends, the fashion, the new ideas. By now creating an additional space for everyone and their dog to promote theirs or others' work freely, they benefit from the existing audience and get exposure previously unheard of. This benefits the artist and the audience, since the audience is getting an uncensored bird's-eye-view of the complete design scene and has access to all potentially new ideas and talents that might never have seen the light of day, while the artist immensely and instantly expands their audience and thus exposure.

Which column on the site is the most popular? What do people check out the most and why?
Statistics show that most people tend to visit Newstoday for the NTB column. A small percentage makes up the active voices within the discussion area: the PV-AN. Next to the daily dose of design-related material that is broadcasted in the NTB column, we do a lot of promotion there, as well as “reposts” of what we see as “worthy” in the public broadcast section: the PBS. Basically, NTB is acts as a filter of good work being posted every minute at Newstoday.

What level of censorship, if any, do you guys have on the site?
High levels of censorship exist at Newstoday. We never claimed to have something like “Freedom of speech” and it turns out that the title “Public Voice” gives that impression to some. Newstoday is run by QBN (The Quorporation Broadcasting Network), which has been nicknamed “Big Brother” over time. The title “Quorporation” was always intended to embody a tongue-in-cheek version of a big corporation, which is re-invorced by our audio-branding, for example. If people feel threatened by QBN, we have done our job successfully. Life isn’t fair, neither is Newstoday.

Newstoday seems to go through phases, one minute the PV-AN is happy and nice, and the next people are bitching and nasty, why do you think this is?
Our latest research shows that this has something to do with polar science and magnetic fields but we cannot confirm this.

How do you see Newstoday developing in the future?
We are launching a legitimate redesign in the very near future, which will take us to a level of increased stability in order to remain exactly what we are right now.

Do you guys have any new projects coming up that you can tell us about?
Yes, but then we would have to kill you.

What do you know about Australian design/designers?
We know what we are told.

Any final comments?
Yes, a quick round of credits is in order: Newstoday would never be what it is today without the help of Mediatemple, Mike Buzzard, Chris Lea, Daniel Vena, Janne Wolterbeek, Richard Groenendijk, all of our NTB broadcast editors and residents of course.

Thanks Newstoday!