The Daily Caller had what I consider to be a bit of a downer of a post. You see, we at the ‘Grok don’t charge at all for the same thing – not even for travel expenses (emphasis mine, reformatted):
Breitbart News recently charged a Texas tea party group at least $7,000 to promote and cover the group’s rally, according to a tea party organizer involved in the planning. On March 15, the group called Patriots Rally for Freedom held a rally in Martindale, Texas. In the lead-up to the event, organizers asked Breitbart News — which recently announced a “Texas bureau” — to cover the gathering. But according to Ken Crow, the tea party activist and founder of TeaPartyCommunity.com who made the call to Breitbart, the site would only cover the event if the tea party group paid for it. Crow revealed the arrangement in an interview with ex-Breitbart News reporter Lee Stranahan, who posted the audio to Twitter Wednesday. Stranahan was recently fired by Breitbart.
“The big item that I really wanted was some promotion leading up to the event,” Crow told Stranahan this week. Crow said that Dan Fleuette, the person he spoke with at Breitbart News, insisted that the media organization would need $11,000 to come and cover the event. In an interview with The Daily Caller’s Mirror blog Wednesday night, Crow said Fleuette eventually acquiesced to $7,000 plus travel expenses. But upon hearing the price, the women organizing the rally flipped out. “The girls are screaming, ‘WE DON’T HAVE SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS!’” Crow recalled.
That quite a bit of cash. During it’s lifetime, I doubt that the ‘Grok has come close to what Breitbart wants for a single event. True, they run multiple sites, lots of staff – and lots of overhead requiring it. That does take money but…
In his interview with Stranahan, Crow said, “I honestly thought this was a very newsworthy event to be covering. I was told Breitbart didn’t have the financial wherewithal to send a crew down there because they didn’t have the advertising base and the revenue to warrant that, and that the organizers would have to pay.” The cost included plane and hotel fees for three journalists — despite the fact that Breitbart presumably had local resources available to cover the rally via its Breitbart Texas bureau — along with technical tools Fleuette said they’d need to livestream the event.
The final fee, which Crow said was paid to Breitbart News 48 hours prior to the event, was $7,000 plus plane and hotel costs. “Originally they told me five to seven thousand dollars,” Crow recounted to Stranahan. “Then there was an issue for uplinks for live streaming. Now we’re up to 8500 dollars, plus we had to fly two people from Atlanta over and one from Washington D.C. to come down and then pay all their expenses too. The entire package was going to run — to have Breitbart cover this was going to run around 11 thousand dollars, as I recall.”…
We don’t have the fancy cameras (er, only one that does livestreaming) and we don’t have the fancy video hardware (just the “tv studio in a laptop”) but for bloggers (and not a big time media site), we can seemingly do 80% of what they do at zero the cost. We just drive, I bring the bags of equipment, Mike brings his MiFi (the “uplink” for livestreaming if we can’t tap into WiFi at the site. Livestream and post stuff later too. And do interviews with folks that you (or us) think are important. And we’ll drive ourselves, too. No per diem costs, either (but are mighty grateful when nice folks surprise us and feed us at the events).
So, got an event we can get to in time (we’re spread all over the State) AND set up and be ready to go at your start time? Let us know – we’ll try to make it!
And again, we’re free but work hard to provide coverage.
