My friend
Boyd Huppert, reporter for
KARE-11 in Minnesota, dropped me a note about
a project that he and photojournalist Jonathan Malat have been working on.
The idea began with Huppert's news director, Tom Lindner, who suggested Huppert and Malat hit the road. They started in the Northeast part of the state, six hours away from Minneapolis, and worked their way counter-clockwise around the state. Boyd sent me an e-mail explaining the project:
[Lindner] sent Jonathan and me out to some of those places to which we only seem to go when tornadoes tear through town. He said, "Let's go to the four corners of Minnesota," and meant it literally. We didn't want to do a travelogue, but rather we wanted to take a deeper look at whatever issue was most affecting life in each corner of the state.
In the four corners of Minnesota we found issues ranging from the painful effects of depopulation, to concerns about tighter passport restrictions, to a mismatch in tax laws that's drawing businesses across state lines, to a creative solution for declining school enrollment.
These are issues rarely covered in the Twin Cities, because they are places we just don't go in our own state -- unless of course it's to cover a triple homicide. Thinking about it now, we really do our rural areas a disservice in that regard. I was blown away by some of the things we learned with one open-ended question: "What are you and your neighbors concerned about in your corner of the state?" In every instance, the answer was completely different from the one we would get in the Twin Cities.
I especially like the stand-up in
part 1. I won't ruin it for you, but it is a nice example of how you can use graphics to explain the main point of a story.
In
part 2, listen for the question that begins with "don't you feel bad..." What a well-placed and good-natured question.
In
part 3, check out the intro. What a great use of words, pictures and sound. Then a minute or so in, you get a HUGE visual surprise. Once again a little while later, you get another stand-up that uses the environment.
By the way, Boyd and I will be teaching visual storytelling at the
Northwest Broadcast News Association gathering in Minneapolis March 28-29. We'll also be teaching at the Alaska Press Association convention in Anchorage in April.
