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23 hours in New Jersey: How I crammed seven shoots into one trip for a powerful story

Whenever I ask my boss for the go-ahead to fly for a story, I shake a little.

I don’t ask often. But when I do, I know I’m requesting an investment. A plane trip requires extra time, at least one additional workday if you combine both flights. It sends me beyond my market, for a story that must remain relevant for a local audience. Above all, it demands money: hundreds of dollars at minimum for travel, lodging, and food.

I know the stakes. So I never go too far with my requests. I research the cheapest flights and try to minimize my nights away, all while ensuring I give myself enough time to make the trip worth it. And “worth it,” in these cases, means gathering enough footage, interviews, and moments to allow me to tell memorable stories.

I got the chance last month, and I turned 23 hours into seven shoots, for a story that demanded each one.

An e-mail popped into WXIA-TV inboxes from a man in New Jersey who claimed to have found a message in a bottle along the Tuckahoe River. The letter, he said, was written by an Atlanta woman named Mary Carter, but he couldn’t track her down because “Mary Carter” is a relatively common name. He had been touched by Mary’s letter of prayer and didn’t want to give up his efforts to find her, so he reached out to us. I asked him to send me a copy of the letter, and within two hours I had located, contacted, and delivered the exciting surprise to Mary herself. I arranged an interview with her, and the man in New Jersey – a high school athletic trainer named Tom Connors – called in via Skype to say hello.

I hadn’t planned on traveling for the story … until I heard Tom and Mary’s conversation.

Mary’s “message in a bottle” wasn’t a frivolous note. It was a letter of prayer, written by a two-time stroke survivor who at the time was watching her elderly father suffer through pneumonia. On a quick trip with friends to Atlantic City, Mary wrote a series of prayers on paper, folded the paper into a pill bottle, and threw the bottle into the Atlantic Ocean.

Tom found the bottle – and its emotional letter – at his own point of prayer. Around the same time Mary wrote her message, one of Tom’s students had wound up on a ventilator with Guillain-Barre Syndrome. He had spent the last six months visiting his student, Amanda, in the hospital and helping her rehab back to full strength.

When they spoke via Skype, Tom and Mary realized how much they had in common. And so did I.

Driving back to the station, I called Tom to learn more, and I discovered a story that went far beyond Atlanta. I mused that I’d love to fly up to New Jersey for a day and shoot his side, but I didn’t know if I’d get the green light.

But I asked my boss. And I got it – by pitching a short, tightly packed trip that would maximize a minimal stay.

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REPOST: What it’s like when your story goes viral

This post originally ran in 2014, when I told Bryant Collins’ story for the first time. Earlier this week, my WXIA-TV colleague Nick Sturdivant caught up with Bryant and found the same humble, giving individual whose story went viral five years earlier.

On Friday, a man named Bryant Collins saved the life of a 15-month-old baby girl, whom he spotted on the side of a highway.

On Monday, I interviewed Collins about his unexpected opportunity to become a hero.

Neither of us expected what happened next.

In a span of 25 hours, the story of Bryant Collins — and the baby he rescued — grew from my NBC affiliate in Atlanta to NBC Nightly News, going extraordinarily viral along the way. I have never seen anything like it, at least with one of my own stories.

And if I had to pick a story of mine to go viral, I might just choose this one.

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I wrote last week about connections leading from one story to another. Then it happened again.

I had thought the time was right to write.

I had just produced a powerful story about a high school student’s graduation that resonated on-air and took off online. I had recognized how that story emerged thanks to a series of “Yes, and …” responses when chances arose. So I wrote a blog entry that detailed the five degrees of separation that led to one poignant piece.

Then a sixth degree showed up.

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I didn’t cultivate connections enough. Once I did, I found a beautiful story.

I was there to teach. For a week in early April, I flew to San Marcos, Texas to serve on the faculty at the NPPA Advanced Storytelling Workshop. I crafted five presentations for the students at the event and, in one case, the students in a journalism class at Texas State University.

But on Day 1 of the workshop, I quickly realized how much I would learn.

In the second hour of sessions, one of my fellow faculty members presented a philosophy that I quickly embraced – and, this past week, paid huge dividends.

Kristin Dickerson is a National Edward R. Murrow and Gracie Award winner who shines as an anchor and reporter for NBC5 in Dallas. We teamed up (along with the tremendous NBC News correspondent Joe Fryer) for a session on how to enterprise story ideas. I led off, but Kristin seized the hour with a ten-minute video illustrating the importance of cultivating your contacts … and not turning your back after you use them for a story.

I immediately realized my own flaw. I seek sources with enthusiasm, but I rarely keep in touch well enough after I work with them on a story. After Kristin’s inspiration, I pledged to myself to be better.

I didn’t realize how quickly it would pay off.

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Sometimes a great story can be as simple as a table and two chairs

This article can be found in the March/April 2019 issue of News Photographer, published through the NPPA.

I’m big on new.

In the last few years I’ve worked with drones, gimbals, and a mirrorless camera. I’ve created Instagram-first food segments and half-hour documentaries. I’ve done all of this from a newsroom – WXIA-TV in Atlanta – and under a company – TEGNA – that preaches innovation.

But when I wanted to attempt a new approach and story structure for a segment involving person-on-the-street interviews – a format that seems to funnel towards boring and uninformative – I reached back to a far earlier creation.

First, my producer and I bought a wooden fold-out table and two fold-out chairs at IKEA. Then, we asked our promotions team if we could commandeer an easel. Finally, we begged our in-house graphical guru to create a poster we could place on said easel, with a recurring question: “What’s your untold story about __________?” For each story we would do, we felt, we would fill in the blank with a relevant subject.

It worked.

On Thanksgiving week and requested stories about gratitude. On Mother’s Day and Father’s Day we found stories about parents. And this past Valentine’s Day, we learned stories about kind gestures. Each time, we shot in multiple locations that represented different communities in our region. We set up multiple cameras, from a traditional TV news kit to a GoPro and iPhone. We didn’t leave until we had interviewed at least three people.

Most importantly, when we did those interviews, we took our time. I didn’t ask for the quick sound bite and leave. I sat for around ten minutes, conversing and learning more about the person across the table. Often I discovered a more compelling story hidden beneath the initial back-and-forth.

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PODCAST EPISODE #70: Reflecting on ten years at one station in Atlanta

I began to notice it sometime in the last few years. New reporters or interns would arrive at WXIA-TV in Atlanta, meet me, and ask how long I’d been with the station.

“I’m going on nine years.”

Eyes would widen, followed by a six-letter word that was either being used as a question or a comment: “Really …”

I immediately felt the need to defend myself. These days, having reached ten years, I still occasionally get the impulse. But whenever I do, I come back to a fundamental truism of my outlook about my job:

I just want to keep growing.

Weeks like this one remind me how much. On Tuesday, my work received four Regional Edward R. Murrow Awards. I had won Murrows before but never more than one in a given year. These stories reminded me how much I’ve grown since I arrived in Atlanta ten years ago.

I share similar perspective on Episode #70 of the Telling the Story podcast.

This is a non-traditional episode, featuring the reading of a recent blog post instead of a longform interview with a journalist or storyteller. Those episodes will resume soon, but I wanted to use this one to spotlight the growth we all hope to achieve in this industry. I hope you enjoy.

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I spent a week covering the aftermath of Hurricane Michael. Here’s how I coped.

Somewhere along the back-road highways on the Florida panhandle, sometime during my third day of enduring images of destruction, I realized I needed to talk to someone.

I had been sent down three weeks after Hurricane Michael to produce a series of stories on its aftermath for my station, WXIA-TV in Atlanta. The cameras always evaporate when the attention dissipates, we thought, so we wanted to divert it back. We wanted to show the very real – and very early – stages of recovery. We wanted to remind our viewers how those in the storm’s eye now face a seemingly permanent new reality.

The first few days went as expected. I interviewed pecan farmers and walked through orchards of leveled trees. I spent a day in Georgia’s hardest-hit city, Donalsonville, where the majority of houses featured blue tarp over their roofs. I surveyed the scene in Panama City and Springfield, neighborhoods in Florida where storefronts and home fronts had been peeled off.

And I drove. A lot. 1200 miles in five days. For large swaths of those rides, I scanned a consistent diet of devastation. I saw piles of felled limbs atop sidewalks, gas stations and mom-and-pop restaurants hollowed out, and mile after mile of trees bent backwards like upside-down check marks.

On the morning of Day 3, I witnessed the worst. I never made it to Mexico Beach, the coastal community in Michael’s direct eye that had been all but flattened in a few hours. But I drove within minutes of it and saw the struggle of communities just beginning to reckon with the aftermath of a hundred-year storm. As I headed back to south Georgia, itself speckled with hard-hit towns, I began to realize how a few short days – spent largely by myself – had gradually worn me down. I struggled to envision how these areas would fully recover. I shook my head at the magnitude and spread of the damage. A few times, I held back tears.

That’s when I picked up the phone and called my parents.

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PODCAST EPISODE #66: Persevering as a parent while powering through at work

Since I began telling people my wife was expecting our first child, I received a familiar piece of advice from acquaintances and colleagues:

“Welp, say goodbye to the next 20 years!”

The implication, of course, is that my priorities will take a back seat to those of my child or children. That’s not wrong. Nearly seven months since becoming a dad, I have happily sacrificed and compromised many other aspects of my life to take better care of my daughter.

But I have also strove to maintain my own ambitions and desires, in a way that fits best my new schedule and responsibilities.

This podcast is one example.

It’s suddenly a challenge to conduct podcast interviews from home. During the day I’m typically at work. In the evenings, I try to keep my voice down so my daughter can sleep. As a result I have interviewed fewer guests for my podcast in the last six months, but I have tried to produce new episodes on a semi-consistent basis.

The solution? These shorter episodes that double as spoken-word recitations of my recent entries.

I did this for Episode 63, sharing my reflections upon my first Father’s Day. I do so again here, on Episode 66, with a behind-the-scenes story of life that intertwined with the launch of a major project at work. I hope you enjoy it … and, parent or not, laugh along with it.

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I just produced a documentary on income inequality. Here’s what I learned.

As a journalist, my biggest adversary is perhaps my own cynicism.

It’s easy to lose that battle. I see the continual triumph of style over substance. I see the burnout suffered by many of my younger colleagues. I see a shrinking number of pieces that truly have an impact.

More than that, I see a far-too-frequent unwillingness to take on the mountainous issues of our time, mainly because of their mountainous-ness. How does one cover a subject, for example, like income inequality, which has been on the rise for decades but seems too widespread and abstract to truly digest?

My answer? Like this.

In my role at WXIA-TV in Atlanta, I receive the chance every few months to produce a documentary, and I often get to choose the subject. I must run it up the ladder of management, of course, and it must fit within the confines and content of our evening newscasts, but I receive much more freedom in story selection than most.

So when I returned from paternity leave earlier this year, ready to embark on a new project, I chose the topic that affects Atlanta more than any city in America.

But I didn’t know how I’d broach the subject. I reached out to several experts in the region, often over the phone but occasionally in person, and I sought potential vehicles that would allow for the necessary depth, detail, and humanity. I emerged with three concepts, wrote proposals for each, and pitched them to my bosses for their preference.

We all agreed: IN CONSTRUCTION was the one.

I had heard about a program that provides a free 20-day crash course in construction for low-income Atlantans, regardless of their background in either construction or life. Many students have a criminal record. Most rely on public transportation. Some are – or recently were – homeless. But when they graduate, they leave with entry-level construction credentials and, 95% of the time, a job with a major Atlanta construction company.

Suddenly my project wasn’t only about income inequality. It was about the challenges and pathways for those in poverty who look to rise up. And it offered a chance to view the issue through the people who live it.

I essentially embedded with a class, from Day 1 to Day 20, and selected several students who agreed to tell me their stories, warts included. Three had served prison sentences. Two were parents looking to do right by their families. All had a purpose difficult to condense or categorize.

This week, four months after I began working on the documentary, I released the finished product online. It airs three times this weekend on WXIA, and it has already received hundreds of views on YouTube and positive reaction on social media. That’s without much promotion aside from my own.

I think often about our platform as journalists and how we choose to use it. Regardless of our status in the newsroom, we all make editorial decisions from the micro (e.g. how we choose to light an interview) to the macro (e.g. how we choose to present controversial issues). I am heartened by the number of web sites and outlets that have found a winning formula for producing relevant content and finding a wide audience. We often struggle to replicate this in local TV news, but I see examples all the time that push back my cynicism and strengthen my resolve.

Sometimes that’s the biggest hill to climb. I’m proud whenever I reach the summit.

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The Solo Video Journalist is available for purchase. You can find it on AmazonBarnes & Noble, and the publisher’s web site.

Matt Pearl is the author of the Telling the Story blog and podcast. Feel free to comment below or e-mail Matt at matt@tellingthestoryblog.com. You can also follow Matt on Facebook and Twitter.

I’m a new dad, back at work. And I have already missed a milestone.

The day my daughter first rolled on her back, I left for work two hours early. I set my alarm for 6 AM, dragged myself out of bed without waking my wife, and tiptoed out of our midnight blue bedroom. Leaving before sunrise is easy … or at least easier. I can kiss Olivia’s cheeks, stand over her crib for a minute, and see only her eyelids. This means I can avoid her open eyes and their enlarged pupils, which beam even in the dark with innocence and – I hope – adoration.

I left before dawn so I could record dawn. I’m a reporter for an Atlanta TV station, and I had scheduled a full day of shoots for a story that would air a day later. I planned to profile a local DACA recipient who paints murals on Buford Highway, our city’s famed 20-mile stretch of international cuisine and culture. I wanted to capture the highway at sunrise, when adults and children spill out from their apartment complexes and await their various buses.

But I was slow to get out of bed, which meant I was slow to leave, which meant I arrived at Buford Highway minutes after the pink and orange blasts of sunrise gave way to blue. I missed the moment, and while I still got many of the shots I wanted, I wasn’t sure how I would fit them into my story. I asked myself, “Why did I leave my wife and daughter to get a few halfway-decent shots that most viewers will barely notice?”

But I know why. And the answer is now its own question I have yet to resolve.

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