William Bastone worked as a staff writer for The Village Voice for fifteen years, primarily focusing on politics and organized crime in New York. In 1997, he co-founded The Smoking Gun, a website that posts legal public documents, mugshots, and arrest records (obtained through the Freedom of Information Act) and investigates everything from bizarre crimes to celebrity slip-ups. It was The Smoking Gun that broke the story on James Frey, which led to the author’s televised chastisement by media mogul Oprah Winfrey. And just last week, their feature story Big Phat Liar revealed that the Los Angeles Times’ March 17th article “An attack on Tupac Shakur launched a hip-hop war” was based on fabricated FBI documents.
When Court TV bought The Smoking Gun in 2000, Bastone quit his job at the Voice to focus full-time on his role as editor of the incendiary primary-source website. In the fifth installment of The Origins of Our Communication, Bastone recounts how a skeptical journalist came to realize a friend’s dial-up connection as the advent of a new media.
Best as I can recall, the first time I ever even saw a web site was in 1995, when I was visiting my friend Ed Borges’s Manhattan apartment. He had a laptop and a dial-up connection, which made things crawl. But I remember being absolutely stunned/excited by what I was looking at.
At that point I was a staff writer at The Village Voice in New York (I almost exclusively covered organized crime, with a little political corruption tossed in). I didn’t have an e-mail account and was, obviously, not tech savvy. I can remember, years earlier, discovering that there was a fax machine hidden in the Voice’s Xerox room (complete with those old rolls of thermal paper). Anyway, after figuring out how to use it, I remember thinking there would never be any better way to transmit documents, information, etc.
It wasn’t long after watching Ed bounce from site to site on his laptop that I thought it might be fun to have a web site of my own. Just something that would amount to a side project to my regular reporting gig, not something that would compete with my Voice work (I needed to keep my job, of course). If I had decided a few years earlier to do such a side project, I probably would have started a ‘zine.
It took more than a year of planning before we got The Smoking Gun online in April 1997 (“we” being myself, my friend Danny Green, an NYC reporter, and my wife Barbara Glauber, a graphic designer). At the time, we had no idea whatsoever that the site would end up getting fairly big, that it would be the vehicle through which all my journalism is delivered, or that our little site-which was headquartered for years in the Bastone/Glauber living room-would regularly break all kinds of newsy, funny, bizarre stories.
Frankly, I’m still a little shocked as we close in on our 11th birthday.
I’m no visionary, so I’d be lying if I said that I anticipated the impact that the Internet would have on journalism-or the speed with which it would radically alter the industry. But I will say that I got an inkling of the net’s reach within the first 24 hours our site went live (April 17, 1997). At the Voice, I could work three months on an investigative piece and if it generated some reader calls and a few letters to the editor (and I mean letters, the ones with stamps), I’d think that was pretty decent. Well, the e-mails that immediately started flowing into TSG were amazing — people offered up suggestions, kudos, requests, some criticism, etc. That conversation — which has never ceased — was revelatory and incredibly welcome.
We ran the site for three years when companies began approaching us to see if we’d consider selling it (we never had a business plan, didn’t try to sell advertising, and paid costs out of our own pocket). It was an idea we embraced because a) it’s always nice getting paid, and b) we would finally have the chance to run the site full time (I was still at the Voice) and see what it could turn into.
As for why online vs. print, well, I’m not going to surprise anyone here: for a site that aims to break news on various topics (celebrity, politics, crime, sports, etc.), the immediacy and reach is unmatched. And I jumped at the opportunity to do everything online because, at the time, not a lot of journalists were doing it, so it seemed like a good chance to jump in and try and get a foothold, establish a rep as a place that delivers original, interesting reporting, a place that doesn’t just run AP stories or riff on the work of others. And for someone who spent the early part of his career working for a publication with a weekly deadline, it has been incredibly exciting to be part of an online scrum where — for us, at least — being second really doesn’t cut it.
Visit The Smoking Gun.
Buy The Dog Dialed 911: A Book of Lists from The Smoking Gun.
Previously on the Origins of Our Communication series
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