We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Wilson Chaney. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Wilson below.
Alright, Wilson thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
It really just sprouted from wanting a platform to call your own, which can be the ultimate safety net depending on how you use it. One of my closest friends Jamail Matthews and I both came together and thought of the idea of creating Unfiltered Media TV, our main goal is to create a media network that produces multimedia content, deliver news and become a platform for small content creators to gain exposure. Jamail and I both have our own Sports show/publisher, however In todays landscape it’s hard for journalists/content creators (specifically minority) to get that mainstream platform. Our main intention of creating UFMTV is to provide that exposure for others. One day our main goal is to transform it into an actual television network, where everyone on board has their own syndicated show and produce media content. After recently graduating from Texas Southern and half of the team being alumni as well, it’s imperative that we create our own platform because there’s a large sum of networks that claim to be for the culture, yet their actions as far as representation refutes that. This is a media network created by the culture, for the culture and I’m proud of its consistent growth in its 2 years of existence.
Wilson, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I was born and raised in Austin, Texas , then I moved to Houston upon finishing my Associates at Temple College. Once there I attended Texas Southern University where I graduated with a Bachelors in Broadcast Journalism. At TSU I started my own sports show called “In My Humble Opinion” and then I just took off from there. I met a ton of connections in my field such as Twitters’ TJ Adeshola, Kenny Smith, and also my mentor Andrew Katz who is a former employee of Twitter as well. I began learning all of the steps I needed to further advance my knowledge in the journalism industry and that’s what led me to create UFMTV. The one thing I’m most proud of so far with my business is we made multiple articles such as Bleacher Report, NY Times, Complex, Sports Illustrated, and several other gossip sites and local news articles just by simply reporting news and going viral on social media. Also UFMTV partnered with the Arena Football Association for a couple of games towards the end of the season. It was short but I learned a lot from my time there. During that period I filmed games (also with highlights), conducted postgame interviews with players and also ran the live stream. Mainly when we cover events such as these we offer digital media coverage along with consistent uploads to social media of course.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
It started from posting news/podcast clips on social media consistently, then it transformed too posting our own individual content on top of it. One method that I figured out is reign the audience in first and THEN post your individual content. Due to the instant traffic you created by posting let’s say for example…..”John Wall said that the rockets sucked on a podcast episode” or “Kyrie donates 50k to a charity” they have no choice but to watch your individual content. It’s a cheat code really, but for some reason no one considers this, the usual formula is Content-then-Audience rather than the opposite. being consistent is a huge factor too, there’s always news circulating so there’s always something to discuss. Right now UFMTV has over 3,500 followers on Twitter, 1,500 on Instagram and over 1k followers with 22k likes on TikTok. So far the formula is paying off
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Man…..where can I start. I’ll pick a recent one, a year and a half ago UFMs Twitter was suspended due to “copyrighted content” being posted. (Even though multiple outlets done the same and didn’t get canned) mind you it was within our first year of being created and we already made several articles up until that point. It was our most significant media outlet for us so far as the network was brand new. I spent 2 weeks emailing different executives from the company that issued the strike on the account, I’m talking about going on LinkedIn and literally tracking each and every one down. It was a stressful experience but the account eventually got reinstated after a long repeal process. A lot of lessons learned from that day but it eventually built character, had to move totally different after that process.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/UnfilteredInd
- Instagram: @UFMTV_
- Facebook: N/A
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/in/wilson-chaney-3291a71b0
- Twitter: @Unfilteredind
- Youtube: Unfiltered Media TV
- Other: TikTok: UnfilteredMedia
Image Credits
Amira Mckoy