Topic is First Look Media's big online video effort—but don't call it a pivot

Wyatt Cenac's most recent project is weird.

It's not really a TV show, but it's also not a film. It's kind of a web series. It's about a regular dude who works as a vigilante crime fighter — albeit a relatively low-level one who deals with the same daily minutiae as everyone else.

It's good, though, and it's the kind of thing the internet tends to facilitate, or at least was supposed to. It's at home at Topic.com, the new video project from First Look Media, which also runs The Intercept, where it kicked off the website's October issue.

"What I'd like to think across the board is that we're interested in and becoming known for very high-quality, visual storytelling that is both entertaining and informative but surprising," said Anna Holmes, editor of Topic.

Cenac's series is the most high-profile project yet at Topic, but there's already plenty to watch, not all of it quite so light-hearted. In just a few months, the website has hosted a variety of videos that touch on just about any and every social issue. Some are documentaries, including "Death in the Terminal," a much-hyped documentary that looks at a terrorist attack in Israel from numerous viewpoints. Topic acquired the rights to the film and is distributing it in partnership with BuzzFeed.

Topic.com is the public-facing part of Topic's studio, which has already established itself with a variety of critically acclaimed projects, including the documentary Nobody Speak: Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and Trials of a Free Press and the podcast Missing Richard Simmons. There are a variety of TV shows and movies in its pipeline, including a movie with Denzel Washington.

At a time when "pivot to video" has become a running joke among media companies, Topic looks legitimately different. Holmes's operation isn't a social media-optimized newsroom full of people cutting food videos for Facebook. There's no newsroom at all.

Michael Bloom, President of First Look Media, made it clear that they're betting on building a brand around original work.

"We are very decidedly not going for scale with YouTubers in what we ... won't say is a commodity market, but there's just a lot of people there and there's not much differentiation to us. We want to do something different with unique people around original stories," he explained.

Holmes said Topic is more focused on finding the right kind of ambitious projects to support or acquire.

"We're not trying to necessarily create a particular voice because we're using a lot of disparate voices in the production and creation of the projects we're commissioning and distributing," Holmes said. "What we're trying to do is to support independent creators with provocative things to say."

This kind of thing takes time; Holmes said Topic is only able to support between 13 and 15 pieces per month. So far, the launch of those pieces has taken on a magazine-like cadence, with monthly "issues" being released all at once.

"Because we have a theme every single month and the theme changes, the tone and the voice and the sensibility is going to change along with it," Holmes said.

The end goal is to make Topic into the kind of brand to which both consumers and creators will gravitate. Bloom compared it to a movie studio like A24, where the mere association with a film lends it an air of credibility.

"Right now what we're doing is building the audience, building the brand, and doing it in a way that we think will teach users and our audience what we mean," Bloom said. "So when you get something from Topic, you're going to know what it means as an end user."