How “All Over The Map” came to life
By Aya Elamroussi
Voice of America, the U.S. government-funded international news broadcaster, sought to report the stories of American immigrants in unexpected places in the U.S. in the project “All Over The Map.” The multi-media project contains four in-depth stories—so far—about the lives of immigrants in Tennessee, Rhode Island, Arizona and Alabama.
The project was undertaken because the former managing editor wanted VOA to explore the immigrant community in a different way, lead journalist on the project Victoria Macchi said.
“A lot of the reason that immigrants end up in unexpected places in the U.S. is because they’re refugees,” Macchi said. “So a lot of our stories ended up really centric around refugee communities.”
“Born to Play: A Refugee Soccer Team Grows in the American Desert” is an example of such story of the multimedia project that shows and tells the experience of young immigrant refugees in Arizona who play soccer on a team together.
“Half a World Away, Vietnamese Build Lives on the American Bayou” is another example of the project that tells the story of Vietnamese refugees finding home in Alabama.
The team
The same team collaborated on the two stories in Arizona and Alabama.
Macchi wrote the text and photographed the two stories.
Arash Arabasadi was the stories’ videographer.
Stephen Mekosh and Dino Beslagic were the stories’ web designers and developers.
Getting the stories
Arabasadi and Macchi were the journalists on site in Alabama and Arizona. Arabasadi with his video camera and Macchi with her pen and camera, taking notes and photographing still photos, Arabasadi said.
“We went to an area, for instance let’s say Alabama, and we spent a week there,” Arabasadi said. And for the first day or two, Macchi and Arabasadi went from place to place, introducing themselves to people.
Macchi and Arabasadi spent time trying to figure out the stories and how they can access them. They asked the people who lived there, “what are the stories?”
“You kind of have to sometimes default to the expertise of the people who live there,” Arabasadi said.
And that’s how they met the people who became the characters of “Half a World Away, Vietnamese Build Lives on the American Bayou.”
“I’m trying to get a total stranger to sit down and tell me about her experience coming to the United States,” Arabasadi said. And in order to get that person to talk, Arabasadi added, journalists must be “genuine, honest and likable” to the point where people will trust them to tell their stories.
Macchi said she loved that she was able to tell the stories of refugees without the “overarching political framework.”
“I think that was really beautiful,” she added.
Arabasadi said that given the nature of the videos he shot of people working at the seafood processing plant in Alabama, he had to be mindful of that fact that their job was “laborious work.”
“It’s not, perhaps, the most glamorous work,” he said. “We really have to be respectful.
“Sometimes you have to be sensitive. Some people don’t necessarily want their face to be shown doing manual labor job.”
Tailoring the project to its audience
VOA’s international audience was an important factor that determined how the project was carried out. Not all of VOA’s audience has the internet speed that can load video quickly, Macchi said.
“We wanted to be as creative as we could and taking into account that we needed something that would be supported on a really low bandwidth, because not all of out audience has access to great internet,” Macchi added.
One way the team got around that hurdle was to turn an essential piece of video visual into an animated GIF, which requires less bandwidth to load.
“If Arash and I could’ve chosen, we would do everything in HD,” Macchi said. “We had great quality stuff, but we can’t necessarily use all of that.
“The web guys were the ones who put the brakes.”
And put the brakes they did because their goal is to ensure that the content reaches the largest number of people, Mekosh said.
“We have a lot of Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and other developing markets that are not on latest iPhone,” Mekosh said. “They’re on feature phones. Think like older BlackBerrys from 2010.”
The areas of the world VOA broadcasts to use either spotty or slow internet connection, Mekosh said.“We need to keep that in mind at all times for projects that are going to be hitting those markets.”
He added it’s more important for those audiences to see something basic and be able to read the content easily and clearly.
The bandwidth issue: ‘It’s a good way to make a videographer sad.’
Developing markets are the “bread and butter” of VOA’s audience as well as the audience of the project, Mekosh said.
“We can’t force users that are on 3g or 2g connections and are paying per megabyte for their bandwidth to download gigantic video,” Mekosh added. “They’re just not going to look at it.
“It’s a huge concern with anything on the web.”
He compresses videos that are anywhere between 50 and 70 megabytes all the way to one or two megabytes to make them reachable to VOA’s audience.
“It’s a good way to make a videographer sad,” Mekosh said of the quality lost due to video compression.
Videos with higher megabytes offer higher resolution video compared to ones with lower megabytes.
But Mekosh had another reason to make some videos into animated GIfs.
A multi-media aspect of the “All Over The Map” stories is that they have cover videos, not cover photos. That is, when readers visit the stories online, the title of each story is displayed on visually looping video.
Mekosh learned that iPhones don’t handle HTML video files automatically. A result of that is the cover videos couldn’t be played automatically, Mekosh said. A play button would show up on the cover videos, and readers would have to press it for the video to play. To avoid that, the team decided to use GIFs for when readers view the content on iPhones.
The collaboration experience
Because the project is a multi-media project, it needed to people with different skill sets as well as different personalities and work style.
Mekosh, for example, said that there was constant back and forth communication throughout the duration of the project. The stories in Alabama and Arizona took between six to eight weeks each from start to finish, Mekosh and Macchi estimate.
Mekosh said it was important to communicate frequently to ensure that the final product is what the team wants it to look like.
Macchi said she isn’t a visual person, but Arabasadi is all about video as a video journalist and has a strong background in broadcast journalism, according to him. During their trips to Alabama and Arizona, Macchi and Arabasadi’s different journalism backgrounds showed up in their daily schedule.
“Sometimes you have to compromise on where you’re going to go, what angle you’re going to take, who you’re going to talk to,” Macchi said. Things that Macchi wanted for the text wouldn’t necessarily be visual. “He (Arabasadi) is thinking about things visually.”
Their schedule was reshuffled so Arabasadi could get b-roll, which is not something needed in text, Macchi said.
Macchi added that she learned to balance “the needs of all the different formats that you’re trying to accomplish.”
Both Macchi and Arabasadi said that they are friends beyond work, which made the collaboration easier.
