http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1

The video above is from the first major project I was able to work on at The News Journal. Ira Porter (how great is that name?) had been working on a story about a University of Delaware professor who was doing research in the Wilmington neighborhoods of Southbridge and the East Side. That quickly expanded to a larger story on what residents thought of their communities and the efforts to bring change into them.

Eventually we published a five-part series on the two communities, as well as an online component that included photo galleries and six videos. Though much of the work was done before I arrived at the paper, I did get the opportunity to film most of the interviews for the longer feature profiles and went out and shot some additional b-roll.

One of the features focused on Antony Logan, who was the only black male in Southbridge to graduate from high school from 2006 to 2009, a fact that I initially found amazing. In his itnerview, the UD professor performing the research, Yasser Arafat Payne, asked, “How did we even let it get that bad?” I don’t think that our piece really provides any answers to the situation, and, on a surface level, many already knew that Southbridge and the East Side were struggling (heck, even I did and I just moved here), but learning about people like Antony definitely put a face to the issue and hopefully served to make it a bit more difficult to conveniently forget about.