Saturday afternoon, a group of Libyans living in Boston gathered in Copley Square to show their support for the U.S. and other foreign countries intervening in Libya. I talked to several of the demonstrators who said they would prefer there not to be bombs dropped at all, but if it is going to happen, they would rather the target be Colonel Qaddafi’s forces and not civilians. Many of the demonstrators were young Libyans whose families and relatives are still living in Libya.
A lot has happened since the last time I updated my blog. Namely, I was hired as a multimedia producer for The Boston Globe and moved to New England.
I’ve been busy getting my feet wet in the world of a major metro with a budding video department, but I found time to go to a crucial Boston event this weekend: the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Southie. South Boston is kind of rough neighborhood, but families flock to the little town to celebrate the deep-seeded Irish tradition of drinking in the early afternoon.
Crowds pouring onto the Red Line
Irish storm trooper
A festive Darth Vader
“Falun Dafa is good”
Public servants
Green beads
Creative drinking
From the article:
“News 21’s Powering a Nation is a student-produced project by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Several different schools participate in News 21’s projects, but this year Powering a Nation clearly stood out because of its unique multimedia reporting on the oil spill. The project features multimedia interviews and stories, as well as interactive games and blog posts written about the project.”
I’m extremely proud that I’m able to say I was a part of this project that has garnered recognition not just as a student project, but also ranked among CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Wikileaks, Pictory, The LA Times, ProPublica, Mint, Life.com and other well-established, professional news companies.
We worked so hard on our stories for Powering a Nation and I cannot believe that it has received this attention.
At the beginning of last week, December 6, I was stationed with a video camera in a Southeast neighborhood of Roanoke (in fact, it was the Southeast Roanoke neighborhood that I actually live in) waiting for police to descend on a man who had begun an armed standoff with them. He was barricaded in a house, had already let his hostages go, the neighboring houses had also been evacuated, and it was freezing cold outside. See the story here on Roanoke.com.
A screengrab from my video showing a police officer in a sniper position during the armed standoff
After about two hours, the reporter leans over and whispers “We got another assignment, quick, let’s go.”
That assignment was the murder of a Roanoke County mother and the amber alert that had been issued for her 12-year-old daughter, Brittany Smith, who was believed to have been abducted by her mother’s 32-year-old boyfriend, Jeffrey Easley. Since Monday, I’ve produced about six videos (on top of my other daily work) pertaining to the story, mostly press conferences, police work and family members pleading for her safe return.
Covering a story like this can be extremely difficult as well as a heartbreaking experience for the family and devastating for a small community like Roanoke County. For me, the whole experience has been a real-life lesson in breaking news, being a flexible video reporter, quick editing, improvising, working with a newsroom team (everyone has pitched in some way or another) and being prepared to multitask on assignment — for one press conference, I even pulled double duty, shooting and editing both pictures and video of the event, on deadline.
My picture featured in The Roanoke Times, Thursday, December 9, 2010 edition as part of the A1 centerpiece, after the jump.
Fortunately the little girl was found in San Francisco on Friday. We are all still patiently awaiting more details of her harrowing week and for the police to reveal more details of her mother’s murder.
Catch up on the story so far and keep up with future coverage on our Brittany Smith Ongoing Coverage page at Roanoke.com
On Sunday, the neighbors and I went out to Craig’s dad’s farm in Floyd, Va. to cut down some Christmas trees to decorate our porch. Craig’s dad and his partner own a piece of land in Floyd County with 60,000 trees, three chickens, two cows, two dogs, three bee hives, and a place where they grow their own vegetables.
It was a perfect day out in the mountains, and we came away with two big trees, two little trees and a bunch of branches to make wreaths out of. I documented our adventure… (and also tried out a new watermark for images)…
Since I’m officially a cat lady now, I’m kind of obligated to post beautiful pictures of my new life partner, Quito. I adopted him from the Angels of Assisi shelter here in Roanoke. It’s a no-kill rescue that saves strays and animals from high-kill shelters and fosters and adopts them out to loving owners. He is named after the capital of Ecuador, which I had the amazing opportunity to spend some time in last summer while working on Living Galápagos.
Such an upstanding, handsome young man.
Quito Facts:
His feather toy did not survive much longer after this picture was taken.
His is a monster-in-disguise.
It was pretty exciting yesterday evening when I got to the newsroom to get prepped for Friday night football, brought up Roanoke.com on my computer, and saw my video story about Rebecca Keller, the twirler for a local high school band, as the centerpiece.
(click to see larger)
I had so much fun shooting and editing that story, and working with Rebecca and her mom Cheri. They were so sweet and great to work with. They said they enjoyed it and I hope other people did too.
You can watch the video either on VarsityCast or in my portfolio.
Recently at The Roanoke Times, I helped out with a big retrospective feature we put together about the flood the happened in Roanoke 25 years ago. The paper had of course done features, even multimedia features, about the flood in years past, but we wanted to create a kind of living oral history for the community. It’s one of those things that everybody has a story about, where they were, mishaps, close-calls and we wanted to give people a chance to share those stories, through written letters, pictures, audio stories, and videos.
I produced four audio stories and two videos for the feature as a way to inspire people to call our phone line and leave messages with their stories.
Out of the things I produced for the feature, I think my favorite is the video I shot and edited about Betty Gusler. She lost her 10-year-old son and her 48-year-old mother during the flood, and she has never has the opportunity to share her story. It’s a sad story, but it really shows the depth of her loss even 25 years later. Click the image below to go to the story about Betty on Roanoke.com…
Also check out the whole Legacy of the Flood feature which has archive pictures of the flood and rescues as well as the clean up and relief that went on for months, audio and video stories, old newspaper e-readers, an article about the 10 people who lost their lives, and interactive then & now pictures.
A friend of mine on Twitter wrote last Wednesday morning “To a journalist, the day after an election is just another hangover.” That pretty much sums up the day after the election for me.
Ryan Loew, a multimedia producer on the online team at The Roanoke Times, and I decided to collaborate on a video to tell a story about the race in Virginia’s 5th district. He went to Chatham, Va., to cover Robert Hurt’s election night party and I made the two-hour trek to Charlottesville to cover Tom Perriello’s. I ended up leaving Charlottesville around 10pm and got back to the newsroom a little bit before Ryan, since Hurt actually won.
We spent the next five hours tag-teaming on editing our video story and I think we were happy with the result. We tried something a little less traditional, making use of video diptychs to transition between the two parties.
Check out the final videon on Roanoke.com
A mile and a half, three miles round trip, up and then down a mountain: No problem, right? Here’s what Kevin Myatt, The Roanoke Times hiking expert says about Sharp Top…
“A rather steep ascent, but not that long. Many folks of all ages and fitness levels hike this trail almost each day in the warm seasons. Hikers in shape should have little trouble and those in not such good shape will get a needed workout.”
I was definitely in the latter group of that statement. It also took more like 2.5 hours instead of the 1.5 hours boasted in the trail info. But, a beautiful — and humbling — hike up to the summit in an area off the Blue Ridge Parkway called the Peaks of Otter did, however, yield a lot of great outdoorsy pictures of leaves and mountains…
From the summit
(I don’t know these people)
(I don’t know these people either, but it seemed like a really sweet moment)
Me, pretty much dead tired and sweaty at the summit.
Here are some stats about Sharp Top:
While my CPOY catalog isn’t as bulky and diverse as last year, I do think the small collection of pictures I chose to submit this year are definitely tighter and stronger. Contests can suck, and be stressful and discouraging, but they definitely, without a doubt, make you sit down and take a hard look at what and how you’ve been shooting. And they can inspire you and make you strive to be better. I’m trying to be less touchy and embarrassed showing other people my pictures, so the screengrab below is an at-a-glance look at my catalog (and you can click through to a slightly bigger one)…
In total, there are (in this order): 3 General News, 2 Features, 5 Portraits, 2 Sports Action, 2 Sports Feature, 1 Pictoral, 1 Documentary Picture Story (based on my thesis project), 1 Individual Multimedia, 1 Multimedia Project (“Splitting main street” from Powering a Nation).
Good luck to everyone who entered! Contests are always exhilarating and humbling… especially CPOY.
Ten years ago, a tragedy struck the LGBT community and the Roanoke community at large. A man expressed his hatefulness through violence that cost the life of one man and injured many others. According to The Roanoke Times…
“On Sept. 22, 2000, a man asked a bouncer at a local restaurant where he could find a gay bar. Given directions to the Backstreet Cafe on Salem Avenue, that man — 54-year-old Ronald Gay — announced he was going to ‘waste some f*gg*ts.’ When he got to the bar, Gay ordered a beer, pulled out a 9 mm Ruger and shot seven people. Danny Lee Overstreet died.”
Each year since, the community has held a memorial at Backstreet Cafe, where the shooting occurred. Some new friends let me hang around and shoot, so here are some pictures from tonight’s memorial…
*All pictures © Copyright 2010 lauren frohne … please ask for permission to copy or use*
Being the only metropolitan city in a vast rural area in Southwest Virginia, Roanoke has a rather large LGBT community. I’m working on a side project, and I went to the annual Pride in the Park festival today to shoot around. This year is the 21st consecutive year of the Pride in the Park festival.
The march and atmosphere…
Leland Albright, 23, works for Roanoke Pride as the transgender representative…
*All pictures © Copyright 2010 lauren frohne … please ask for permission to copy or use*
My first week in Roanoke is complete. It’s a transition, I suppose, but a good one. I’m all settled in the newsroom and super anxious to start telling some gosh darn stories.
They put me to work for the first time this Friday night to shoot a high school football game. I had to shoot video, interview a player, escape from the deluge of people leaving the game, get stuck in traffic in a high school parking lot, eat Sonic tater tots and drink a Diet Dr. Pepper, capture an hour of tape, edit the game into a short video, encode in Flash, upload and post that same night.
In summation, here’s what The Roanoke Times newsroom looks like at 3:30am…
It was a long, but enthralling night. Editing video on a PC, Windows-based machine for the first time ever, using a program called Edius.
It really wasn’t bad at all, but I didn’t have enough time or sanity left to sweeten the audio and smooth out some things here and there. But overall, I’m happy with the outcome, which you can view at http://www.roanoke.com/varsitycast.
And this weekend, after I caught up on sleep, there was an adventure up to Roanoke Mountain, where I took more pictures of pretty, mountainy things.
You can actually see the back of the giant star on Mill Mountain from Roanoke Mountain!
This is basically the new Windows default desktop background… at least that’s what I was going for…
A leaf bug
This bug typically likes to hang out in my apartment, but here he is, alive and outside for once.
The valley.
Some big and sudden news has really overhauled my life in the past couple of weeks. After living in Chapel Hill/Durham for the past eight years, I moved to Roanoke, Virginia this past weekend to start an internship with The Roanoke Times. I’ll be working with the online team for Roanoke.com as a videographer through December.
!!!!
I’ve been daydreaming about working as a journalist at a newspaper since I was a little kid, so I’m excited to get started and to work with such a great team. My first assignment is Friday, so in the meanwhile, here are some pictures I took yesterday evening from the top of Mill Mountain, where Roanoke’s signature light-up star resides. (Sidenote: Roanoke vaguely reminds me of Quito, Ecuador – a beautiful city surrounded by mountains on all sides – except about a thousand times smaller. Regardless, I love all things that remind me of Ecuador and, by proxy, the Galápagos).
While working on my thesis project, I’ve developed some good relationships with people in Durham’s homeless community. Because of this, Open Table Ministry, a local nonprofit who provides outreach services to people who are homeless, recently asked me to take portraits of some of their community members for a brochure. Here are three pictures from that little project…
Kimberly, a native of Western Massachusetts, has lived in the woods of Durham, NC with her fiancé for the last year.
Slim, chronically homeless and an alcoholic, lives in a tent behind a church in Durham, NC.
Carl, homeless for 23 years, has lived in a tent in the woods of Durham, NC for the past eight years. He recently participated in a rehab program and is currently in housing.
One of my best experiences this summer was working on a story about nuclear energy with a truly multimedia team.
There was a total of four of us on the team: a writer, a graphic designer, and two of us photo/video kids. My colleague Jessey Dearing shot with me as the other photo/videographer on this project, which was great dynamic since his background is more photo-oriented and mine is more video. So we really had the whole package, really strong reporting, writing, graphics, photo and video. And I think that shows in our final story package, title “Nuclear Properties”.
We ended up with two interactive graphics, a lengthy text article and an interesting video in an experimental format. I’m especially proud of the text article, not because I wrote any part of it, but because we were able to incorporate video quotes and pictures in a really organic way that breaks up the length of the story while also enhancing its content. Chris’s amazing writing didn’t need much help, but I think the video elements offer readers a great way to get to know the characters he describes.
So check it out and let us know what you think!
Below is a re-post of a picture story I posted on our Powering a Nation blog a couple weeks ago. I spent a couple weeks documenting Cherie, and she is one of the most amazing people I’ve met. She was so warm and welcomed me into her life during a tough time for their community.
Also check out our newly published story packages on Powering a Nation.
By LAUREN FROHNE
The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has rocked the small towns that thrive in southern Plaquemines Parish, La. Located in the southernmost tip of the state, and now surrounded by oil-filled bays, Venice and its neighboring towns, Boothville and Buras, have been described by many as “ground zero” of the disaster. Life-long fishermen are now fighting on the front lines of the battle against the oil that threatens both their livelihoods and their community, small businesses are struggling to survive and families are uncertain about what their futures hold.
Cherie Pete is the owner of Maw’s Sandwich & Snack Shop, located right off Highway 23, the main road through the peninsula that leads to Venice, in Boothville. Five generations of Cherie’s family were born and have been raised in south Plaquemines. Her husband, nicknamed “Hawk,” is a commercial fisherman who is now contracting as a clean-up worker for BP.
Known by her family and the community as “Maw,” Cherie is struggling to keep her business afloat and her life positive through the disaster.
Cherie said that starting the shop has been a dream of hers since she was six years old, and that it’s a place where the community comes together. “It’s kind of been a welcome center to new people coming to town, and it’s almost been a comfort zone to my community,” she said.
Maw’s is a training ground for teenagers working their first jobs. She feels the connection to the community and the opportunity is important for the young adults in the community, but she worries about the effects the oil spill might have on their futures. “They’re just out of school, they’re having fun, but I wish they were paying a little more attention so they could take life a little bit more serious, especially right now. We don’t know what tomorrow’s going to bring, and I think they need to be preparing themselves,” Cherie said. “I have the one girl, she’s bound and determined she’s going to work at Maw’s forever, but, you know, Maw’s might not be there forever.”
“Cameras just come up to the window and instead of giving an order they’re doing an interview,” she said. Recently, Cherie has become a voice of her community. She has been interviewed dozens of times by media such as ABC News and The Weather Channel. She believes it’s important to continue talking to media. “That’s just who I am. I love my community. I love my family. And if we don’t stand up and start talking about it as a community, or even as individuals, and getting our story out there, no one’s going to know we exist.”
Because of her media appearances, Cherie has received calls from people located around the U.S. who want to offer her kind words of support. Tears fill Cherie’s eyes early one morning as she listens to a woman from Las Vegas, Nev., tell her that everyone in the country is thinking of her and her community and wishing them the best.
A flag, colored with black marker, hangs in front of Cherie’s store and states: “Thanks for nothing BP. Obama stand up for us.” She said her husband refused to take the flag out on the water to dip in actual oil. “Our national government is just failing us. They are failing us. They’re not standing up to this oil company and making them responsible,” she says. “How would they like for us to go by the Washington Monument and just start dumping gallons and gallons of oil all over the Washington Monument?”
“One day, this shop might really end up being a ‘mom-and-pop’ shop,” said Cherie, imagining what life in south Plaquemines might be like without the commercial fishing industry. “I lay at night in bed and pray that everything will be back, but I don’t see that happening. I don’t want to go to the thoughts of what it’s going to be like with everything gone.” She is still hopeful. “My hope is that they get this all stopped, get us cleaned up, to be back, next spring, flowers in the marsh blooming, trees in the marsh turning green again. I want to go out there for that April fish, you know, just hop on that boat, say, ‘Oh my god, that’s a beautiful day, let’s go on the boat.’ That’s what I want back.”
Photos by Lauren Frohne
I haven’t updated my news section in quite some time, mostly due to how busy I’ve been in the past 6 months.
I’m technically done with my master’s program coursework at UNC-Chapel Hill, after a busy Spring semester of helping to teach Multimedia Storytelling with Laura Ruel and doing thesis project work. Now I just have that pesky little thesis to finish before I can officially receive my degree.
For my thesis, I’ve been looking into homelessness in Durham, and the experiences of people who are trying to find homes for themselves. I’m working with three subjects documenting: a chronically homeless man, a woman who became homeless due to drug addiction and is working her way through drug recovery programs, and a man who is recently homeless and dealing with the new life he leads. One of my portraits from this project won second place for the portrait category in the NCPPA!
Carl Bittner, homeless for 23 years, stands near his tent in the woods along 15-501. Carl is among the approximately 675 homeless people who live in the woods and on the streets in Durham. Like many, he suffers from alcoholism and the dabilitating effects of years of alcohol abuse, and has been applying for disability benefits for three and a half years, unsuccessfully, in an attempt to secure permament housing. When asked why he continues to drink despite his health, Carl says If you lived out here in this environment, you would drink, too.
That project, however, has been on hold for about two months now because of my News21 fellowship at Powering a Nation. We are working on four big stories (Energy politics, the Gulf oil spill, energy and employment, and nuclear power) and have done a ton of traveling to report on them.
In the past two months, I’ve traveled to Louisiana three times (Venice and News Orleans), Burke County, Georgia twice, and Brattleboro, Vermont (as well as surrounding cities in Massachusetts and New Hampshire) to report on energy-related stories about the oil spill in the Gulf and nuclear power. It’s been a whirlwind of content gathering, and now we are in post-production mode for the next three weeks.
In Louisiana, we’ve been working with families and individuals who are currently feeling the devastating impacts of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Most of our subjects are fishermen and their families in Venice, Louisiana. It’s been an emotional six weeks of to say the least. We’ve witnessed everything from meetings with experts from the Exxon-Valdez spill in Alaska to happy family events to a mother making the difficult decision to send her children to safer place.
We also put together a short video about a community of Vietnamese fishermen in New Orleans East and all the uncertainty that they are dealing with:
In addition, we were able to break a story about BP’s attempt at blocking media coverage of the spill and clean-up efforts by contractually preventing fishermen from speaking to media out of fear of being fired. We were linked by several media organizations, including Huffington Post and Washington Post.
For our nuclear power story, we toured nuclear power plants in Vermont and Georgia. I’m currently producing the video component of that story package, and still don’t know how I personally feel about nuclear as a major power source in our country. Here’s a reel of shots from our tour of Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in Vernon, Vermont:
So far it’s been an incredible experience and I’ve met and worked with people that I look forward to following up with in the future.
Another visual journalist that I’ve been traveling with put together a blog post and Google Map showing all the places we’ve been and ground we’ve covered in the past 6 weeks.
View Miles and miles in a larger map
So what now? All of our News21 stories will be published by July 23. So check Powering a Nation for updates. After News21, I will be working hard to finish my thesis early in the Fall semester.
Then, who knows! But, I will definitely be updating both my blog and portfolio with new content soon.
For advanced photojournalism, I had to shoot a news event and put together an audio slideshow. I ended up covering a Greenpeace event in New York City that was part of 350.org’s International Climate Action Day. The story needs some work, but check out what I turned in for class…
Sometimes I get asked to take portraits and band/musician photos. I really enjoy the departure from more “journalistic” shoots because I get to tell people what to do, adjust the scene, and play around with Photoshop more. And most of the time, the only stipulation that bands and musicians have is “make me/us look cool,” so that leaves the door open for a lot of creativity.
I did a shoot a while ago with Joe Romeo, a musician in Carrboro, NC. I ended up giving him a ton of photos that came out pretty nicely and it was a really fun, albeit really long, shoot. Here are a couple of selects that I liked a lot:
You can check out the whole set HERE.