Cover of Press Record: The DIY Video Life of Jonathan Harchick

Foreword

Some people wait to be given a stage. Jonathan Harchick built one out of paper signs, a camcorder, and a bedroom in Pittsburgh, and then he did it again, and again, for more than twenty years.

This book exists because a shelf of his videos tells a story that does not fit inside any single one of them. A kid who taught himself to make television years before YouTube existed. A teenager who built his own audience-participation system, vote by vote and contest by contest, because no platform would do it for him. A young man who burned discs, hand-built websites, and walked into paintball forums asking strangers to watch episode 27. A grown creator who kept going, past every reasonable stopping point, until the work itself became the biography.

Most coffee-table books celebrate what everybody already saw. This one celebrates what almost nobody saw, and why it mattered anyway. The screenshots in these pages were pulled straight from the videos, frame by frame, many of them in the blocky, low-resolution quality of the era they came from. We have not polished them. Their roughness is the point. Every one of them is a small record of someone learning, in public, with whatever he had.

A word about honesty, since it is the foundation this whole book stands on. Talking With Jon was not famous. It was a teenager's show, made in his bedroom and distributed by hand, by website, and by forum posts, to a small audience, over five years. We are not going to pretend it was anything else. Its value is not that the internet noticed it. Its value is that it shows, in complete detail, what an ordinary ambitious kid had to do to publish video before publishing video was easy, and that he kept doing it for half a decade anyway. If a number is approximate, we say so. If we do not know something, we say that too, right on the page.

Jonathan co-wrote this book, and he asked for the same thing he has always asked of his work: tell it warm, tell it true, and assume the best of everyone in it. He also wrote books of his own, once, a long time ago, before the videos took over. This one is about the videos.

Turn the page. It is 1989, and there is a camcorder on a shelf, waiting.

Young host at his bedroom set, Talking With Jon
Young host at his bedroom set, Talking With Jon

Contents

Part I: Before the Platform

Part II: Talking With Jon

Part III: The Other Early Experiments and the Brand

Part IV: The 2011 Stunt Era

Part V: The Long Game

Part VI: How It Was Made

Part VII: On Screen and In the News

Part VIII: What the Bedroom Taught