Multimedia enriches visual journalism.
A passive experience becomes a dynamic one in which the engaged media consumer prioritizes and chooses information. Human interest stories come off the screen. People tell their stories in their own environs and in their own words. I’ve been lucky to tell stories, highlight events and work with talented individuals throughout my career. Here are some multimedia projects I like.
Chicago’s Gospel traditions | Medill News Service – Chicago
While in the Multimedia graduate program at Medill, I collaborated with extremely talented and smart journalists from all over the world. On this project, I worked with a talented journalist named Peter Holderness. We produced a multimedia package examining gospel music traditions in Chicago. A destination point for southern African Americans seeking better lives up north, Chicago was the incubator that nurtured southern field hollers and brow-raising blues tunes with New Orleans jazz and European classical music traditions. Chicago birthed both the harmonized melodies of gospel ensembles and its instrumental (and controversial) sibling.
Extreme beer | stltoday.com
At the P-D, I collaborated with beer industry reporter Jeremiah McWilliams and photographer Adam Wiseneki on a story about extreme beer brewers. As chefs experiment with different ingredients, cooking/baking techniques and seasonings, craft brewers take beer brewing to new levels that incorporate ethnic and regional recipies, ideas and techniques.
Iraq War: Five Years Later | stltoday.com
In 2008, we planned comprehensive coverage on the anniversary of the Iraq War as well as the 4,000th U.S. war casualty in Iraq. Here is my Iraq War multimedia project. Once my project was done, the print designer incorporated a similar visual treatment, so the whole project had both visual continuity, and each media format referred to the other.
Recent presidential elections | stltoday.com
P-D Flash guru Brian Williamson and I completed a Flash-based graphic that shows both national and state-by-state vote totals for presidential elections 1980-2004.
The graphic involved numbers-crunching of a large amount of voting data obtained from the Federal Elections Commission. A collective 52 arrays over 12 categories later, we had it working. Check it out here.
Cultivating business in Chicago’s Pilsen, Garfield Park neighborhoods | Medill Reports-Chicago
Along with general interest stories, topical news and profiles, I created and co-created stories that showed how the housing crisis and economic crunch were being felt in Chicago’s southern and western neighborhoods in 2007. Also, I worked with fellow Medill Reports-Chicago reporter Satta Sarmah on a multimedia story package examining the difficulty sustaining current businesses in Garfield Park and Pilsen, two economically challenged communities drastically affected both by the current economic climate and by wounds of the past.
Invisible victims of meth series | stltoday.com
I collaborated with P-D reporter Christine Byers and photographer J.B. Forbes on an interactive Invisible Victims of Meth online special report. I produced the web page and created vector and interactive graphics for the presentation. Please note that some story links result in error messages because the links automatically purge from the system.