In a project called News 21, UNC was tapped as an incubator school, with eight grad students
and two undergraduates producing stories in different formats and interactive projects on the mountaintop removal
method of mining coal. ... They were expected to emerge with an understanding of the technology
behind multimedia storytelling that most experienced journalists don’t have.
investigative reporting and deliver it
through interactive games, comedy, sound
slides and video as well as written stories.
“[The stories] might fail terribly in
some things. But they might push the
envelope in ways it has never been pushed
before that will open up new possibilities.”
Students also use UNC faculty research,
such as Ruel’s studies on eye-tracking, to
know what attracts people visually. She
learned that tight focus on faces attracts
users’ eyes. Gabriel Dance ’06 (MA), a senior multimedia producer with The New
York Times — where many of his co-workers in the online department are Carolina alumni — applied that research in
designing a mosaic of faces of soldiers in
Iraq to tell their stories.
Dance is a veteran of international trips
led by Rich Beckman, UNC’s former
James L. Knight Professor of visual communication who now holds that title at the
University of Miami School of Communication. Students applied for one of 12 to 18
positions on Beckman’s documentary teams
that played to their expertise as graphics,
EILEEN MIGNONI
NACHO CORBELLA
COURTESY OF PHIL DAQUILA
Laura Ruel, opposite
page, is professor
and executive producer for an experimental project called
News 21. Among the
students participating last summer
were, from top,
Monica Ulmanu, listening to a former
cotton farmer
explain how wind turbines work in
Roscoe, Texas;
Eileen Mignoni, in
Michigan preparing
to fly over and photograph windmills; and
Phil Daquila, with
children in Newtok,
Alaska, during
reporting on climate
change affecting
their village.
