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THE MEDIA CO.
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The retro-style "Candy Wrapper" & "Gum Stick" logos
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Established in the San Francisco Bay Area of California in the heady-mix of the earliest days of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Google way back in 2004, A. A. Augustine's Media Co. was incubated for 3 years as a "retro-style", traditional and digital media company.
The company officially launched in 2007 and since then, has gone on to create and produce multiple children's, tween and teen book series as well as their accompanying hard and soft product lines, podcasts and gobs of music and comic strips and of course, my flagship, kids and regional travel series encompassing over 300 episodes which have been broadcast on PBS, My Network TV, COZI-TV, KOFY, AMG and RTV as well as hundreds of smaller, local stations all across the US. ~AA
Prior to my career in the broadcast television industry, I worked as a guitarist/singer-songwriter, engineer & producer eventually founding an independent record company and recording studio out of Boston, Massachusetts and Buffalo, New York.
From 1994 through 2004, I engineered and produced over 75 bands and solo artists throughout the New England and Western New York regions, releasing and distributing over two dozen albums on my indie record label. Through a series of twists and turns through the fall and winter of 2004, I decided to take an opportunity to move out west to the San Francisco Bay Area of California in August of that year, smack in the middle of the heady-mix of the earliest days of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Google, to head-up a start-up "retro-style" kids media company that eventually became my namesake and my life's work. A. A. Augustine's Media Co. was incubated for 3 years and officially launched in 2007 as a "retro-style", traditional and digital media company. Under my guidance, the company has since gone on to create and produce multiple children's, tween and teen book series as well as their accompanying hard and soft product lines, podcasts and gobs of music and comic strips and of course, its flagship, kids and travel TV series encompassing over 300 episodes which have been broadcast on PBS, My Network TV, COZI-TV, KOFY, AMG and RTV as well as hundreds of smaller, local stations all across the US. Currently, I'm producing two new travel shows for PBS (WNED) for the Western, New York and New York State markets titled "Small Town WNY" and"Small Town NY" respectively. Each show will premier on PBS stations all across the state starting in the Spring of 2023. Through the years, I have also written hundreds of reviews on regional WNY restaurants and entertainment venues for the Buffalo News, relocated and operated my families 32-year-old Italian restaurant for a decade after the sudden, tragic death of my father, toured throughout the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes region of the US with my bands, created and produced over 175 TV commercials, written 12 novellas, several short stories and penned hundreds of comic strips and songs as well as taking the obligatory summers-long tramp through Europe in a rental car with no phone and no map through the summer of 1999. As one of my television industry mentors puts it, "He'd rather work than play, because his work IS his play!". After 15 years in New England and Northern California, I'm currently living back in my hometown of West Seneca, NY with my "too-cool-for-school" cat Rumbles, a turtle named Herbert H. Hebert the II and two large and way too gregarious goldfish named Stan & Ollie. ~AA
After a mind-numbing five years producing multiple children's television shows as well as all of A. A. Augustine's Media Co. 's companion books and soft and hard-line products, the company was finally, firmly established throughout the Northern California region by the summer of 2012 and a true change of pace to a town with a far less hectic environment was desperately needed.
The gorgeous town of Sonoma, right in the heart of the Northern California wine country, was chosen for the move. This transition soon found me taking a little time off for the first time in almost a decade exploring my newfound home on some pretty epic, but still relaxing and meditative Sunday drives throughout Sonoma county. Within a few months, these weekly adventures exploring the Redwood forests, rivers and coastal areas of this transcendentally beautiful place became too great a call to arms to resist and I knew I had to share what I was seeing and experiencing with the world at large and the core concept for the companies first regional travel show was born. Appropriately titled "Exploring Sonoma", the show was quietly developed over the winter of 2012-2013 and immediately green-lit during the very first pitch meeting with the program manager for Northern California PBS. But life still happens to you even while you're busy making other plans (as the song goes), and within a few months of that initial "green-lit" pitch-meeting with Northern California PBS, a family emergency brought me back home to WNY in April of 2014 just as "Exploring Sonoma" was starting production on its pilot episode, putting it on indefinite hold. Undaunted by the sudden, unexpected turn of events and determined to not let any of it hold me down or back, I quickly soldiered on in WNY going with what I was most familiar and comfortable with, creating and producing not one, but two regionally based "retro-style" kids TV shows. Any ideas of a travel show at this point would have to wait. The two kids' shows would premier on two stations in both the Rochester and Buffalo markets a few months apart through the summer of 2015 with the initial premiere of the first show in Rochester on July 4th, 2015. After all I had been through that year, it was independence day, indeed. The two regional kids shows would eventually be followed up with the companies first, finally official, regional travel show entitled "Discovering WNY" in 2017 and "Small Town WNY" and its companion show "Small Town NY" in 2022. ~AA |
