“You always do the second trip’” — Epic claims success in making long-form journalism profitable
For the last decade Joshua Davis has made a living out of chasing extraordinary true stories.
In his early twenties, getting frustrated in his job as a data-entry clerk, Davis saw a flyer for the US National Arm Wrestling Championship and decided to participate. Weighing only 129 pounds and having no experience in arm wrestling, he lost all the matches. Davis found fascinating stories among the wrestlers, however, and successfully pitched a story about them to a national magazine.
Since then the reporting adventures of this San Francisco-based writer and contributing editor for Wired are summarized in his ten-word bio: Joshua Davis has spent time in prisons on three continents.
Now Davis is embarking on a new kind of adventure, one that traverses the perilous terrain of the media business. He and business partner, Joshuah Bearman, are determined to figure out a way to monetize investigative long-form journalism. Their solution undertakes storytelling from a cinematic perspective: they specifically hunt for stories that would make great movies on the big screen. Bearman and Davis launched their company, Epic Magazine, in the summer of 2013, with the goal of commissioning and publishing long-form articles and then selling the rights or “options” to them to television and film companies.
Their idea is not as much of a long shot as it sounds, and is based on a scaled-up version of their professional lives and experience. Over the past decade, both Davis and Bearman have successfully sold rights to their own magazine stories, amounting to ten option deals each. Option deals offer huge variations in what writers can potentially earn. “We’re talking about as small as a thousand dollars. But in some cases [they make] six figures,” Joshua Davis says.
Davis’s Wired piece about a group of illegal Mexican immigrant students taking part in an underwater robotics competition was transformed into the movie, The Spare Parts by Lionsgate and Pantelion Films, and premiered in January. Bearman’s Wired article on a covert rescue operation in Tehran was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film, Argo, in 2012.
Thanks to their own profitable option deals, Davis and Bearman have been able to spend extensive time investigating and writing long-form stories. “I used to write three stories per year,” Davis says.
Now they are eager to create the same chance for other writers, too, by pursuing alliance between Epic and the movie industry. In September 2013, after a round of talks with almost all of the major film studios, they closed a two-year deal with 20th Century Fox. For a flat annual budget, Epic is committed to publishing a minimum of six stories per year. Fox has a two weeks’ first-look right for every piece. If the film corporation decides to option the story, the Epic writer gets a pre-negotiated option fee that Epic’s founders describe as “substantial”.
In his article about Epic, Mike Fleming Jr. from Deadline, the Hollywood-based entertainment industry news site, claims to have never heard before of a studio making a deal with journalists for the first look at their articles.
When discussing the business deal, Joshua Davis is quick to emphasize that 20th Century Fox does not have editorial jurisdiction over which stories are assigned. “They don’t participate in the editorial process. And if [in the end] they don’t want to option a story, we can take it elsewhere,” Davis says.
Even though the article might be optioned, receiving the “green light” from Fox or any other film company and finally, to actually see the story on the screen, is extremely rare. According to Davis’s own experience and observations, only about one percent of optioned projects ever are turned into films. However, he feels more optimistically about the chances than the averages reported in Hollywood, saying, “Our rate of getting our stories adapted is higher, roughly ten percent. I like to think that’s because we’re good advocates for our projects.”
If one of Epic’s stories finds it way into a movie screen or TV, the writer and Epic split a certain percentage of the film or TV producer’s net proceeds. The split varies depending on from whom the idea came: if the story was the writer’s idea, she gets the greater amount.
However, to reach that satisfying point requires rigorous in-depth reporting. An Epic story can take anywhere from three months to three years — or more. “We try not to put artificial constraints on the story,” Davis says.
At present, Epic has commissioned 30 to 40 stories from approximately 20 freelancers by paying them a flat fee, depending on the writer’s experience. Epic also covers travel expenses and other reporting costs.
If a freelancer gets stuck and the process is delayed, Davis, Bearman and newly recruited editor Stephen Elliott generally suspect a reporting problem. “We have a saying here: ‘you’ve always got to do the second trip’. You come back [from a reporting trip], you process it, maybe even start writing it, and then you go again. All of our stories have second, third, fourth trips.”
Davis says that Epic’s aspiration is to release things that are “really amazing.” However, coming to that point is not easy. To do these stories, the editors struggle with deciding when to stop reporting and when to publish the story. In every instance, Epic’s editors have taken the side of perfectionism and its many hardships.
“There’s been a lot of argument about ‘let’s publish this now, it’s 90 percent ready’. Then, well, why settle it 90 percent, why not get 95, 98, 99 or even one hundred?“ Davis says.
The goal of getting the finishing touches perfectly right seems to construct a bottleneck in Epic’s business model. The in-depth reporting with several field trips requires time, which may work against the monetization of Epic’s content. The battle Epic is currently fighting is to find balance between the perfectionism in storytelling and keeping the publishing pipeline flowing.
After all, the 100 percent quality may not be the central issue for the movie industry partners. This claim is something that makes Davis hesitant.
“I don’t know how much the studios care about the line-by-line beauty, or the depth of the understanding the character,” Davis says. “On the other hand, the work that we do, trying to understand the people we write about and the length we go to do that, make it much clearer what the movie would be. And hopefully, it gives the filmmaker more to work with and also keeps the film more grounded.”
The ambitious reporting trips have taken Epic writers around the globe. Their stories have included ones about a fine-art-loving gentleman thief in Venice, Italy; a former Marine Special Forces operative obsessed with traveling to the world’s conflict zones; and a young Haitian woman and her suspicious death.
The content, published on Epic’s own website and Medium blog, seems to have found its readers. One of their most popular stories has gained 130,000 reads. Surprisingly in today’s journalism field, where the fight for catching eyeballs is fought in every moment, Epic founders need not to worry about website metrics.
“From the movie folks’ perspective, [the readership] doesn’t matter. It matters to us just because we care about the readers,” Davis says.
The quest to make digital storytelling immersive excites him. Davis acknowledges that for the moment, long-form reporting in digital form doesn’t have the same resources as used to be available in print, mostly due to the lower ad rates in digital platform. However, he sees a change coming.
“To me it seems inevitable that those ad rates will climb and that people will build platforms for immersive, rich, and in-depth journalism experiences,” Davis says. “The Atavist has showed an amazing path forward, winning the National Magazine Award for feature writing.”
For the time being, Epic’s model seems to be working well, too. Davis describes the Epic’s first 20 months as a success. Since the company launch in August 2013, seven Epic articles have been optioned by Fox or other film companies. The latest of them is an article about Silk Road, the black market website known for selling illegal drugs, by Joshuah Bearman. The research for the story took over two years.
