Tag: video

  • The life and death of Zahra Baker

    When my friends at the Hickory Daily Record asked me a couple of months ago to help them with a video project about the Zahra Baker case, I said an enthusiastic “yes” right away, despite the fact that a) I’d never really worked on a documentary video script before and b) it was a tragic…

  • The fabric of story

    I love this. Joan M.E. Gaither, a Maryland-based documentary fabric artist and retired educator, spent two years documenting the National Black Theatre Festival in quilt form. It has sweep and exquisite attention to detail. Spread on a king-size bed, its edges would spill to the floor. We talked with her a few days ago at…

  • The ghosts of urban renewal

    “Most Forsyth County residents don’t know it,” wrote Journal reporter Annette Fuller in today’s front-page story, “but when they travel Business 40 at U.S. 52 — the county’s busiest intersection by far — they are driving right on top of the old Belews Street neighborhood.” Before Mr. Eisenhower’s audacious interstate system came to town, Belews…

  • A Labor of Love

      As an editor, I’ve learned to love living vicariously. Other people, reporters and photographers, go out and collect material and then they bring it back to my desk and say, “Here, can you do something with this?” Photographer David Rolfe is a born storyteller, and he’s one of the few journalists I know who’s…

  • Metamovie

    Every year around this time, our little tobacco town puts on the RiverRun International Film Festival. It’s a big deal, and it’s one of the best things about living in Winston-Salem, but I never seem to have enough time to see all the movies I want to see. My own plight inspired me to make…

  • Lester, thank you for being

    Lester Davis isn’t shy about telling the story of his 20-year addiction to crack cocaine, nor is he reluctant to give thanks to the people who helped him find love and redemption and a deeper, truer sense of connection with God. He spends much of his time these days working with men who struggle to…

  • Remember This Name

    Once in a while I get lucky. Not too long ago, my old colleague Chris English called and asked me for help. He’s the photo editor for university publications at UNC Greensboro, and he’d just come back from a photo shoot with a UNCG alum in Nashville, where he’d taken oodles of photographs, shot video…

  • The Murders at Grassy Creek

    When three people were murdered on a Grayson County, Va., Christmas tree farm, suspicion soon focused on Freddie Hammer, a man who earned his living chopping firewood and doing odd jobs in neighboring Ashe County, N.C. In 2008, reporter Monte Mitchell of the Winston-Salem Journal spent several months unraveling Hammer’s complicated past, including his conviction on…

  • Jousting with the Dictionary

    The story of spelling whiz Josiah Wright, a home-schooler from Fleetwood, N.C., in Ashe County, was one of my very early video pieces, and despite its vast imperfections it is still one of my favorites. Josiah represented Northwest N.C. at the Scripps National Spelling bee in 2007. He made it to the finals, but was…