Web and TV Journalism: News, News, News

During the summer months between the ages of eight and thirteen, I had only one rule to follow: I must remain outside between the hours of 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., with one hour allotted inside for lunch. I could only gain admittance back into the house at 6 p.m. if I was at least partially covered in dirt. Confusing as it was, my mother periodically reminded me that a dirt-covered shirt and muddy sneakers demonstrated to her that I “played hard” that day. “Matthew, there are indoor kids, and there are outdoor kids,” she would say. I was to be raised the latter.
            To my professionally minded parents, I was a peer in some respects. They considered me a skilled engineer who specialized in the art of tree climbing, stick throwing, and hole digging. At dinner each summer night, they asked me to explain the ins and outs of my day as if I were an industry insider revealing secrets about my field. I reveled in their questions and graciously kept them up to speed on topics as diverse as the inflation of local candy prices or the marketability of the new routes to China that I was digging in our front yard.
            As I grew into my preteen years, however, I found my warm, summer days accompanied by children in the neighborhood who my mother referred to as “indoor kids.” They were physically awkward types who spoke passionately about Ninetendo, wholesale computer expos, and the advent of 3.5 floppy disks. They smelled of Pine-Sol and plastic, and I greatly enjoyed the strange intersection of our interests. When I taught them to build forts or catch squirrels, they appeared cautious and stiff, yet when they taught me the joys of DOS and a plentiful amount of RAM I embraced every word they said.

Aug 27

Web and TV Journalism: News, News, News

Web news:

TabsOnObama.org is well on its way. The site launched not too long ago and has been picking up traffic. If you happened to be at any tech or political conference in the New York Metro Area in the past two months, you may have seen us present. We’ve been at BarCampNYC at NYU’s ITP, Personal Democracy Forum at Lincoln Center, Participation Camp at NYU, as well as a group of several meetups such as the Open Gov meetup at New Work City.

Things are going smoothly and we look forward to pulling your ratings of the Obama Administration into its overall approval rating. We also will be adding several new sections soon in order for visitors to the site to rate other parts of the Obama Administration.

Below is a video I created to explain the site to visitors:

Journalism News:

I have been interviewing scientists recently for the Simons Foundation, an autism, mathematics, and general science research foundation in New York City. It has been a challenging and exciting experience as a science journalist due to the fact that I am interviewing scientists and researchers on complex topics for an audience of their peers. The subject matter is thick and technical. However, I have truly never had better training in the field of journalism. It has taught me hard research skills and forced me to understand topics that I may never have even attempted to comprehend otherwise.

In the past few weeks, I have had the opportunity of sitting down with both Isadore Singer, one of the world’s greatest mathematicians, and Arnold Levine, a professor at the Simons Center for Systems Biology at Princeton University. The interviews can be found below.

It has also been a fascinating process in reworking my instincts as a videographer. Because the content is so technical, I have not been filming as much B-roll and have been instead holding my shots on the subjects themselves. This style is a far cry from what I am accustomed to. It has forced me to make darn sure my questions are relevant, interesting, and compelling. Without B-roll to take one’s attention away from a lull in the conversation, every sentence truly must be relevant to the subject at hand.

TV news:

After a brief jaunt around the world, I came back to find that Highway Science, the Discovery Channel show I created that is tentatively scheduled to be Discovery’s first original series made for the web, was without a sponsor. However, Discovery and I buckled down recently and things have just picked up within the last week. It looks like production may begin sooner than later. I wish I could post the pilot of the show, but like with most networks, I am sworn to secrecy and can only say that the show is gearing up to be one of the most interactive programs of any kind made to date. That’s a big statement, yes. However, I have high hopes for Highway Science, and I expect to start work on it very soon.

Keep holding on to those socks! This is going to be one crazy science show. Stay tuned…

Interactive Projects

I’ve been staying under the radar for the past few months while working on two new projects, both of which are just about done. The first is a new travel show for Discovery and the second is a interactive, politically-focused website.

About six months back, some folks at Discovery Channel asked if I would put together a pilot for the first original Discovery web series. As I’m sure you know, for the past several years television networks have been diversifying their interests as advertising revenues plummeted. Times are tough, and media companies are scrambling to crack the safe on the web tv phenomenon. As a result, they have begun creating original content produced specifically for the web, and the pilot I produced is POTENTIALLY to be Discovery Channel’s first stab at this manner of show.

I knew several things going into production: 1. I knew the show had to focus on hard science. 2. I knew they were interested in me specifically because they wanted it to be travel-related. 3. I knew I had an extremely small budget to shoot it. 4. I knew they wanted it to be world-shatteringly interactive.

Now, I cannot say much about the details of the show. However, what I will say is that from what I can see this show could potential bring network/viewer interaction to a new level never attempted before. I took a long hard look at Discovery viewers and tried to understand what it is they really are looking for in the Discovery/viewer relationship. What I found is that Discovery viewers seem to want to physically be experiencing what they see the host and camera crew doing in each Discovery show. Sounds a bit obvious, right? Well, I sat and watched Discovery Channel for a few hours one Saturday afternoon with friends, and what I heard coming out of their mouths were phrases like, “How cool would it be to be doing that?” “Can you imagine what that’s like?” “Man, what I wouldn’t give…”

So, after mulling over several different hooks for the show, I figured if Discovery Channel viewers want to literally seek out the camera crews and hosts they see on television, why stop them? Anyway, that’s where I’ll leave it for now. Check back to see if and how this project evolves. Below are some screenshots from the pilot episodes.

As for the new politically-based site, I’ve been helping a friend in New York create a site called Keeping Tabs on Obama (www.tabsonobama.org). The site focuses on evaluating and rating the Obama administration. What we’ve done is take the 26 camapaign promises that Obama featured on www.barackobama.com before the election and allow visitors rate whether Obama has stuck to his word. Visitors to the site can also rate and comment on the administration’s weekly radio addresses or cabinet members as well.

Keeping Tabs on Obama will be launching very soon, and we’ll have to see whether or not Discovery bites on the pilot. In the meantime, please sign up on www.tabsonobama.org to receive email notifications of the site’s launch.

Jan 29

Save AiB

Alive in Baghdad (www.aliveinbaghdad.org) is a project started by Brian Conley and Steve Wyshywaniuk, two 20-somethings from the Philadelphia area. Conley, a former film student with an interest in the Arabic language and the Middle East, flew to Baghdad, sought out Iraqi civilians with knowledge of videography, and equipped those he found with small consumer-level video cameras. The project’s objective–to produce Iraqi-filmed news segments for the web and, in turn, avoid the numbing filters of mainstream news media; in essence, have Iraqis film each other. In AiB’s early days, footage was shot, taken to a translator once a week in a separate area of Baghdad, and then mailed to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; therefore rerouting the content around the biased hands of network journalism. By matching up the time codes on the tapes with those noted on the translation, Conley and Wyshywaniuk were then able to subtitle the footage their correspondents captured.

Somehow, someway, the project was a success. As the war has dragged on, tapes have continued to pour in the door the past several years. And although the project has become a bit more tech heavy since its start, the same basic principals are used when shipping content between parties.

AiB has received both national and international press attention with Conley and Wyshywaniuk even finding themselves on programs like Good Morning America and CNN’s Headline News. In fact, I met the two when interviewing them for The Tokyo Shimbun, a newspaper with a circulation 4 times that of The New York Times. Point being, if you are a news buff, you’ve probably come across their names sometime in the past several years. However, despite how much attention the project has received, AiB struggles financially. It seems AiB is too controversial for a company to attach its name to, but far too important to allow it to slip into a peaceful digital nostalgia.

The reason I am writing this post today is because Alive in Baghdad, like many other journalistic endeavors, is currently in serious jeopardy of closing. Since becoming involved with AiB in March of 2008, I have watched an unparalleled degree of self-sacrifice from the AiB founders. They have truly placed the interests of Iraqis far above their own, and with thousands upon thousands of viewers, it is time to give back to this unique project.

Alive in Baghdad is a source of news that is unmatched in it’s utilization of technology and volunteerism, and it will soon post it’s last episode unless we do something about it. Please donate whatever you can at www.aliveinbaghdad.org. Below is an episode from earlier this month. Click the image to play the video and please visit Alive in Baghdad for more information.

Thanks.

- Matt