Media Bureau Network: founder Ben Barnett sells Northern Liberties HQ

For some, it’s hard to say goodbye to the 12,000 square feet of memories on 3rd and Brown Street in Northern Liberties.

After 13 years in its brick layered and artistically decorated home, digital media agency Media Bureau Network is moving.

MBN, the digital media strategy and content production house that was once a self-styled scrappy, webcasting pioneer, provides a large-scale environment for back-end productions, says founder Ben Barnett.

After launching in 1997, MBN became among the state’s first online networks, its small group of contributors wrote, produced and directed original content with the intent to distribute through internet channels. All with a goal of informing communities, something like the high-tech answer to pirate radio.

“We’re a for-profit that acts like a non-profit,” Barnett, 44, the MBN founder told Technically Philly. Curbed Philly first reported on the sale last month.

Media Bureau founder Ben Barnett

The sale is part of the business plan that MBN intended to follow all along, says Barnett. By relocating to a hopefully bigger and newer building, the network begins its third tier of its business model, which is focusing more attention on fewer projects. The organization has been an evolving media shop, from consulting to infrastructure builds to publishing, including ownership of the now defunct pa2010.com.

For now, no next space is confirmed and the activist group with no shortage of missions and causes continues to orient more toward art.

MBN’s main focuses will be on its Independent Film Festival and its newest project, takeactionnews.com.

Watch a soundslides on the sale.

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MBN has had a great relationship with Northern Liberties as well, adds Barnett, who now lives in Glenside.

His group offered free, open Wi-Fi to its neighbors while the technology was still new, said Barnett, and he worked to add fiber optics, ISDN lines and other advanced technologies to the neighborhood well before they were common in municipal impact conversations.

“Our goal was to activate the community,” Barnett said.

The MBN building has always been an open connection in NoLibs, he said. Residents of the neighborhood are allowed full access to the building, including walk-ins and privileges for events. He believes that the business has brought as much as it could to the neighborhood, including a popular artist in residence program, and that it will now benefit from the sale.

The outfit makes its money largely as a web strategy consultancy, in addition to event sponsorships, ticket sales and some online revenue from advertising, small transactions and other side projects, Barnett said.

Barnett’s path to founding MBN is as circuitous as its mission and efforts.

After attending American University as an undergrad, he attended The Academy of the Arts in San Francisco, where he received an MFA in advertising design. Barnett’s experience in the 1990s booming San Francisco, as well as his world travels, helped him develop a more comprehensive idea of what he believed Philadelphia needed, he said.

“I really took the time to travel the world, to work and when we started this, it was like, what can I see from around the world that I can bring to Philadelphia?” Barnett said. One of his best experiences was teaching in Prague in 1990.

Since launching the effort in the late 1990s, Barnett has made his living off MBN. He’s had other full-time staff but not since 2008. He has a dozen collaborators, but all on a part-time and creative basis.

So how does Barnett feel about selling after 13 years?

“It’s emotional,” Barnett said, “We really feel like what we’ve done is something that the City of Philadelphia has embraced from an independent level.”

With memories including his former house and meeting place of his wife, Barnett acknowledges the vast amount of accomplishments the building has seen, including Grammy award winning artists.

Barnett will continue his work with MBN and their latest project takeactionnews.com. The website, which came from the sale of the political web organization PA2012.com, takes journalism to the next level. Its goal is to provide media-neutral content with interactive links for readers to be involved.

“It’s not about conglomerating local content. It’s enabling the reader to take action,” Barnett said. MBN will work with David Shuster, Charlie Mitchell and Alan Rosenblatt to develop takeactionnews.com in a new building.

MBN is in negotiations with the move, but one thing’s for sure.

“We’re staying in Philly,” Barnett said.

This is a report done in partnership with Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods program, the capstone class for the Temple’s Department of Journalism.