JOVRNALISM + Arizona Republic: Hoop Dance

Class, Project

As part of the Spring 2022 semester, JOVRNALISM partnered with the Arizona Republic to collaborate on a series of stories relating to the indigenous communities. While the students are still in post-production on some of the stories, we did publish an immersive documentary on the World Championship Hoop Dance Contest held annually at the Heard Museum in Phoenix.

The Republic published an article with our video embedded: https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2022/03/28/hoop-dance-world-championship-returns-heard-museum-phoenix/7187452001/

Our video here:

Or on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/693233016

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JOVRNALISM in Doha

Blog, Class, News, Project

JOVRNALISM was invited to attend the Doha Forum in Qatar and present its award-winning, immersive work

Six JOVRNALISM alums and Professor Hernandez were flown to Qatar as special guests of the kingdom after some government officials experienced immersive projects during a USC Center on Public Diplomacy summer workshop.
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Black Soldier Flies: Fighting Food Waste

Project

Waste management has been a global environmental topic for some time. For places – especially islands – that are isolated, this issue becomes more urgent.

Santa Catalina Island, less than 50 miles southwest of Los Angeles, welcomes nearly one million tourists from all around the world each year. Behind the beautiful view, Catalina is in a race against time to maintain sustainability.
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JOVRNALISM to produce immersive stories about foster care system in partnership with Peace4Kids and PBS SoCal

Blog, Class, Project

For the new project, JOVRNALISM partners with PBS SoCal’s To Foster Change and Peace4Kids, a non-profit organization that aims to build a supportive and warm community for foster youth in South Los Angeles.

Peace4Kids has provided mentor programs, leadership programs, and family meals to teach and care for foster youth, according to its website.

“We work very intensely with transitional age youth (age 16 to high school graduation) and we thought it would be best to highlight their stories using the virtual reality platform,” said Miriam Cortez-Cáceres, the program coordinator at Peace4Kids.

The project aims to produce foster youth’s stories through emerging technologies such as virtual reality(VR) and Snapchat augmented reality(AR) lenses, according to USC professor Robert Hernandez.

Read the whole story here: http://www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2019/10/22/usc-jovrnalism-to-produce-immersive-stories-about-foster-care-system-in-partnership-with-peace4kids-and-kcet/

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A new perspective from Homeless Realities

Blog, News, Project

Sitting on a Los Angeles street curb, my partner Alex Li and I were waiting the police siren to stop so we could continue interviewing Tim Sterry and Daisy Kukuruza about their romantic relationship while experiencing homelessness and living on the street.

“Why aren’t more stories like this told by media?” Sterry asked, pointing out that media coverage usually portraits the homeless community in a negative light.

Unfortunately, as a journalist, I can’t disagree with Sterry’s statement.

When the 2018 Fall semester began, our entire JOVRNALISM class had two weeks of brainstorming ideas. The class was already cautious to avoid reinforcing typical, negative stereotypes about the housing insecure community. Our stories ideas ranged from police harassment to sexual assault in the homeless community. Ultimately, our project didn’t used any of our ideas.

One question we often get about our resulting project, Homeless Realities, is how did we connect with this community, which is often standoffish and reluctant to be have its stories told by the media.

It wasn’t easy.

As part of our reporting, a few of us volunteered at several non-profit organizations, trying to contact with the community there, but, while we gain credibility with the organizations, it didn’t successfully lead to ideal sources.

We decided on a different approach: In partnership with the non-profits, we organized a multi-day workshop to teach selected members of the homeless community how to shoot in 360/VR and work with them to tell stories their own stories.

Professor Robert Hernandez leads a workshop with project partners inside the downtown Los Angeles Central Library.

As we met in the downtown Los Angeles Public Library, the 10 participants – who were selected and vetted with the help of the non-profits – had hands-on experience with the 360 cameras and were taught basic immersive storytelling techniques.

Then they each pitched the story they wanted to tell through immersive.

None of the pitched stories were even close to our class’ initial brainstorming ideas. What resulted were stories about a homeless woman running a small business out of her car; experiencing housing insecurity while working two jobs; cooking for church to help others; being a homeless musician trying to perform; using art to help with mental illness and homelessness; and, of course, a young couple in love trying to foster intimacy while living publicly on the streets.

At the time of this project I was a managing editor of USC Annenberg Media and no stranger to approving news pitches.

I have to be honest, with each pitch the participants made I would ask myself typical news editors’ questions like “why is this newsworthy?” or “what’s the news peg?” As editor, it would have been difficult for me to approve these story ideas.

I realized that I was worrying too much because their honest and accurate stories weren’t being experienced – let alone pitched – outside of the homeless community.

Homeless Realities highlights the diligence, dream, arts, talents, service and love found within the homeless community, like any other community. When we first publicly premiered the final pieces at the downtown library, someone from the audience noted that all our stories seem positive and asked if we should look into the dark side of being homeless.

Remember, we did not choose these stories. We empowered the community to tell their stories, the ones they wanted the world to know most. JOVRNALISM came to the community with a platform to tell their stories, instead of the typical news media approach of parachuting into a community hoping to tell stories on their behalf. Media often go in with a story in mind, looking for sources that fit their predetermined narrative.

In our project, these stories come directly from the community. These stories are underreported. These stories deserve to be heard.

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JOVRNALISM & The Wrigley Institute

Blog, Class, Project

This past week, JOVRNALISM traveled to Catalina Island to visit the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies. The institute, which is an extension of USC Dornsife College of Letters and Sciences, researches different ways to implement environmental sustainability into everyday life.

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JOVRNALISM launches Homeless Realities

Blog, News, Project

Members of the homeless community and JOVRNALISM students collaborated to tell immersive stories about life on the streets of Los Angeles.

The project combined 360 videos, drones and photogrammetry to produce immersive experiences including augmented reality via Snapchat.

Launch the project site: http://homelessrealities.jovrnalism.io/

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Drawing the Border

How To, Project

Note: This post originally published on August 11, 2018, on the Journalism 360 Medium site: https://medium.com/journalism360/drawing-the-border-6f13316e9065

To tell the story of the deported in Tijuana is to truly illustrate a new, unfamiliar reality. Just a few miles from San Diego, Tijuana may not seem immediately different from any American metropolis.

Most cities take shape similarly: they have concentrations of large buildings and concrete paths; plazas will restaurants and office spaces alike; developed districts and rougher parts; and cars and people, and therefore traffic.

On the surface, Tijuana felt familiar.

If you want to read more about this process, go here.

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Profiling Soft Power

News, Project

Inspired by the success from our Winter Olympics coverage, the USC Center on Public Diplomacy again approached JOVRNALISM for another collaboration. This time the focus was about a new play called Soft Power, that was coming to Los Angeles.
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Documenting the life of the deported

News, Project

While we read the headlines and hear the news stories, what happens to someone when they get deported from the United States and are sent to Mexico, a country that many deportees don’t know or speak the language?

What threats do they face when they walk into Tijuana, Mexico? Where can they go and who can they turn to for help? What unknown threats do they now face?
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