[The Other 99. Foreground: reporter, videographer Tim Pool; background: Henry Ferry]
I first spotted Tim Pool on Nov. 4, in New York, amid the unfolding events at Zuccotti Park. He was wearing a Voltaic backpack with a solar-charger and high-capacity battery for powering a cell phone. (He has since upgraded to the $150 Energizer XPAL, 1.8-amp battery that sustains a day of continuous video streaming.) The 25-year-old Pool revealed deep insider knowledge of the scene at the place where Occupy Wall Street activists were gathered. He knew about the new General Union, formed by the maligned hardcore campers fom the western “ghetto” end of the park as an alternative to the well-known General Assembly. About a week later, a prominent member of the General Assembly’s PR team still barely knew about it.
About two weeks later, Pool had become world (wide web) famous. He captured much of the early morning raid and diaspora from Occupy Wall Street’s Manhattan encampment, staying on and webcasting for most of the 20 hours straight he spent covering the event. His video stream drew more than 20,000 simultaneous viewers and 250,000 unique visitors throughout the course of the day. It was also rebroadcast by Al Jazeera English and other outlets. Pool stayed mostly on for 12-and-a-half hours during the string of protests on Nov. 17 and drew 737,000 unique viewers.
In terms of on-the-ground coverage–it’s the most compelling kind for events like this, really–Pool and the budding media company he’s part of, The Other 99, has been cleaning the mainstream media’s clock (he has been featured by MSNBC, Time Magazine, NPR, and others). Even the police are watching, according to comments by Pool himself–he described passing by a group of officers during a recent march, one of whom looked at him and said to his colleague, “That’s the live stream.”
Pool and his partner Henry Ferry are doing more with $500 Samsung Galaxy S II phones on Sprint’s 4G Network than TV networks can muster with thousands of dollars of gear, satellite trucks, pretty anchors, and helicopters. CBS News’s UStream, for example, offers an unfiltered feed from its eye in the sky. But the CBS feed has often felt like a mere complement to Pool’s on-the-ground coverage. (Plus, Pool and Ferry hope to get flying video drones that would augment their coverage–read on). On Nov. 17th, for example, when Pool was among thousands who first gathered at Foley Square in Manhattan then walked over the Brooklyn Bridge, the helicopter pilot on the CBS Ustream searched for the right shot, panned around the city randomly, and talked to a person presumably back in some studio about his wife’s prowess for holiday tree decorating.
On Nov. 18, the day after the Foley Square and Brooklyn Bridge events, Pool sat down for a chat but had to keep breaking away–for a phone interview with The New York Times, at one point. Then we spoke as he simultaneously hosted a chat on alt-culture website Reddit. He also read a few of his 300 emails, including one from a fan who thought he should win a Pulitzer, another from a book agent, and one from a woman who wrote, “You probably get a lot of these, but I think you’re real cute.”
