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April 3, 2009, 12:23 p.m.

Jennifer Crandall: How to build support for newsroom innovation

Jennifer Crandall of the Washington Post has been assembling a sum of many parts, the highly-regarded onBeing series that runs weekly on washingtonpost.com. (It’s been on hiatus for a while and is supposed to relaunch sometime soon.)

The series, which features interesting people saying interesting things in a spare white environment that strips away context and puts full attention on the words, is reminiscent of Studs Terkel’s oral histories — sharing the notion that ordinary people have extraordinary points of view. Crandall conducts the interviews in a small studio, shooting with a single Sony HDV camera then editing with many jump cuts and focal lengths. But what matters is the people she finds, and she spoke at the recent Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference about the work that goes into finding the
right people to interview.

Between sessions, we also got a chance to ask her for some advice on creating and working on sustained and innovative projects such as onBeing.

POSTED     April 3, 2009, 12:23 p.m.
PART OF A SERIES     Nieman Narrative Conference 2009
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Journalists fight digital decay
“Physical deterioration, outdated formats, publications disappearing, and the relentless advance of technology leave archives vulnerable.”
A generation of journalists moves on
“Instead of rewarding these things with fair pay, job security and moral support, journalism as an industry exploits their love of the craft.”
Prediction markets go mainstream
“If all of this sounds like a libertarian fever dream, I hear you. But as these markets rise, legacy media will continue to slide into irrelevance.”