WHAT? Don't bury the 'What'

good advice from the Poynter Institute's tip of the day:  One of the biggest mistakes in feature writing: an over-reliance on emotion.

I totally do this!

Actually, I'm have a revelation of a sort this week. As I go back to watch the videos I've made over the past few months, in order to choose some to enter into the nppa clip contest, I noticed that I bury my 'what' in almost all my videos. Viewers have to make it half way through the video before finding out the 'what' of the story. I put the 'why' and the 'who' and the 'where' long before the what. Why do I do this? My logic up to this point has been that I want to put the most interesting parts first because I want to hook people and keep them interested and to me often the 'what' of the story is the most mundane part. But, if you don't know what you are watching or reading the 'why' becomes a great mystery. And that's when people lose interest and stop watching. It's time to change.

With that said, here's a story that I made last week about Tom Loux. Tom makes a living doing dove releases at funerals and weddings. He trains the birds, which are actually white homing pidgeons, to fly back to his home in Arvada, CO after being released. I'm telling you all this now because you won't find it out in the beginning of this video. My mistake. If I were to do it again, the editing process would go differently. 

9/11 is more real for me now

Ten years ago I was 14. I did not know anybody directly affected. I did not read many articles or watch much tv. I was in my own small world, a world that yes, was affected but no not greatly affected. I did watch the towers collapse in class at school, 9th grade, and it was horrifying. My brother and sister-in-law lived in Weehawken, NJ and worked in Manhattan, my sister-in-law even worked near the World Trade Center. Luckily they were both fine. So fear and anxiety and strong emotions, for me, receded quickly.
   
Things have changed. I've been working on a series of videos for the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and in the process my eyes have been opened to tragedy, to anguish and to courage. I've learned so much about what happened on 9/11 and how it affected people that I now know. I met Ann and Dutch and Susan and the Yancy's. For these people, it was all real and close to their hearts and heads ten years ago, and for them, they never had learn about it through other people's experiences, they always knew first hand.
   
One of the guys we interviewed, Dutch, emailed me with some pictures I'd asked for. Dutch lives in Boulder with his three sons and wife. We interviewed him because his younger sister Nina worked in the World Trade Center and died that day. Dutch and Nina were really close. I'd asked Dutch if he was willing to share any pictures of himself and his sister. He returned my email late late into the night. In it, he included some lovely lovely pictures and a few words..

"I found more but some were too personal and others were too embarrassing…I spent a couple of hours going through old photos.  it  was good for me, brought back some really fond memories.  though I have to say I miss her more than ever right now…"

It was such a seemingly small gesture for him to have included these words in an email to me, someone whom he has met once and talked on the phone with twice.  But when I read it I thought about Dutch and his sister laughing at the dinner table when they were kids and that they used to write letters in code to each other. Memories he was able to share with us, but memories nonetheless that he does not bring to the surface often because it is too painful, memories of a lost sister. 
   
Due to my growing personal connection to this event in the past weeks, my fascination has snowballed. And I think it's because I'm looking and reading with a new perspective.  I've been reading articles written back in the days directly after 9/11, I've been reading retrospective articles, I've been watching StoryCore animated videos (which, by the way are interestingly different, check them out), and videos telling the story from the photojournalist's perspective (Witness to History: The Photographers of 9/11). I've listened to The 9/11 Tapes: The Stories in the Air. I've looked through tons of photo galleries. There is so much happening around the world and for me to take the time to really read and investigate and understand something that happened far away from me, be it physically far away, or emotionally, I need to find a way to connect personally to it.
   
I guess in the end, this post is about my growing understanding of what journalism means to me. So, broadly, journalists are responsible for bringing as a real an understanding of 'what happened' to their audience as possible. More specifically for me right now, journalists have the opportunity to take a big far away event and give someone an avenue into understanding it on a personal or individual basis.
To show how it affected real people, and what it felt like to be affected personally so that that person can relate and empathize and understand with their hearts. 
   

Before, I knew 9/11 as a whole, as an event. It was big and horrible, too big really for me to comprehend at age 14.  Now, when I read all these articles and look and pictures and videos, I think about what it meant for the people I interviewed for this story. Now I can see 9/11 in small heart-wrenching pieces as well as hopefully begin to better see the mosaic. I hope the videos I've contributed to the Denver Post's 9/11 - 10 years later can give some people that avenue in.

   
This video is one of eight vignettes of people connected and effected by the attacks of 9/11. My colleague, reporter John Ingold, and photographers Craig. F. Walker and RJ Sangosti also worked hard on the written and picture portions of these profiles, you can check out their work and the rest of my work here.


Ten years ago, Ann Wichmann took her dog Jenner to New York as part of a local Federal Emergency Management Agency Administration rescue team that searched the rubble of ground zero.