Show-Launch Electronic Press Kits

The Problem

Before a new Discovery series aired, critics and TV writers needed to watch it, understand it, and file their stories ahead of launch night. A generic press page in the house template did none of that justice. A show about cryptid hunters working at night reads nothing like a show about aquarium builders or military dogs, and a one-size press page flattened all of them into the same gray screen.

The Work

I designed and hand-built the electronic press kits: the private microsites Discovery sent to journalists ahead of each premiere. Over three years I shipped close to two dozen, one per show, each built to match the tone of the series it introduced, from gator wranglers and cryptid hunters to aquarium builders, catfish noodlers, military dogs, and the activists of Whale Wars.

• Finding Bigfoot opened on a night-vision map of sighting hotspots, the same green-on-black language the field team used on camera.
• Gator Boys, River Monsters, and Pit Bulls & Parolees each got their own key art, type, and motion, so the kit felt like the show and not like a corporate shell wrapped around it. Tanked went further and shipped localized in three languages: English for the Asia-Pacific feed, plus Spanish and Portuguese for Latin America, so the international press channels launched with the same look as the US kit.
• Mermaids: The Body Found leaned into its eerie, is-this-real tone, because that is what the special was selling.
• Glory Hounds, the film about military working dogs, opened cinematically and quietly, because that is how the show carried itself.

Every kit did the same job underneath the art: let a writer screen embargoed clips, pull stills and boilerplate, and get to a draft without emailing anyone. I built them in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript rather than a fixed template, so the layout could bend to whatever each show needed.

Impact

Close to two dozen of these kits shipped over three years, across Animal Planet, Discovery, Investigation Discovery, and the international networks. Each one gave its show a voice in the press channel instead of a house template, and each one let a writer screen the embargoed footage and file a story in a single sitting, ahead of launch. That was the whole point: make the critic's job easy, and let the work look like the show it was introducing.