Category: New Media
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Sacred Rivers: Tashlikh on the Hudson
The Yadkin River partners — Christine, Phoebe and I — spent Rosh Hashanah on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I’ll never forget it. We set out early that morning on foot in search of people going to the banks of the Hudson River, in Riverside Park, to perform the ritual of Tashlikh. It’s such…
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Elizabeth’s Story
For the last several months, Journal reporter Laura Graff pieced together the story of Elizabeth Lentz, Ms. Wheelchair North Carolina 2011. It’s a remarkable and moving piece of serial journalism that gives readers an intimate look at the life-shattering experience of traumatic injury and the personal courage it takes to rebuild a life. A spinal…
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Dedicated
My colleague Lisa O’Donnell wrote this top-notch, and way overdue, story about guitarist Lowman “Pete” Pauling and the 5 Royales, a legendary R&B group from Winston-Salem that never got the kind of mainstream respect they deserved. Lisa is a heckuva writer, and the story couldn’t possibly have been in better hands. Check out the first…
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Podcast Redux
The relish.com podcast has been evolving over the last few months, and I gotta say that I’m pleasantly surprised by how much fun it’s become to produce. YouTube and our vast photo archive make for a entertaining treasure hunt each week, but the latest addition is our $6 green screen. A few weeks ago, our…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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A River of the People
About a year ago, writer Phoebe Zerwick and photojournalist Christine Rucker set out on an audacious project to tell the story of the Yadkin River. The river is right now the focus of an intense fight between Alcoa and the state of North Carolina over who should control a series of hydroelectric dams on the…