Online journalism has the potential to make an almost instantaneous connection among audience, journalist and subject anywhere in the world. PBS Frontline’s series “iWitness” makes excellent use of webcam interviews to transport viewers to far-flung places and tell stories about global art, politics and social change. Recently it covered Kiva’s microloans in Ayacucho, Peru, to see how Kiva has evolved in the three years since Frontline produced a documentary about the organization.

I caught up with Joe Rubin, the video journalist who produces and hosts iWitness, to learn more about the program.

NEED: You use webcam to do short interviews with people in the field—whether they’re journalists, activists, or others who can give firsthand accounts [of global issues]. Why does iWitness choose this approach?

iWitness: I specialized in doing foreign journalism, and going back a few years, using relatively inexpensive, small format production equipment, so we could spend more time in the field and didn’t need an expensive director of photography and a sound crew the whole time. I’ve always been interested in using technology to tell stories. About a year and a half ago, I was talking with someone over Skype and I realized that this is a great way to access people in different parts of the world and not only is it inexpensive, it’s free. That was interesting to me and interesting to people at Frontline, so we pursued it and we created this show format around it.

NEED: You can reach a lot more people.

iWitness: It’s ranged from everyone from reporters for Frontline in the field, to the mayor of Tbilisi, Georgia, to activists, human rights workers, the whole spectrum.

NEED: Why is this kind of storytelling important?

iWitness: This offers a sort of immediacy which you sometimes lose when you’re spending weeks and months telling the story. There’s something good about that, and I also think there’s a kind of intimacy to it that reminds me of radio in that when you have a crew somewhere, it creates a barrier [that] can make people more nervous. [With webcam] it’s almost like you’re in the room with someone.

It’s sort of a new frontier, which is crazy sometimes because you’re totally reliant on this connection which, in some places, can be spotty. It’s also about the digital divide between countries that have internet and those that don’t have internet. Frankly, if people in Burma could be webcamming their experiences and have total freedom to do that—or in Iran—I think that would be potentially detrimental to those regimes.

NEED: I can imagine that viewers might want to get involved in some way after they hear about a story. Have you heard of any impact that Frontline’s coverage has had on Kiva?

iWitness: I think I mentioned in the interview about Kiva that we did one of the first major stories on Kiva. At the time they had done something like 500 thousand dollars in loans. It had such a huge impact that they actually crashed their system because all these PBS viewers wanted to give money. It was like a crash course in getting up to speed, and I think it was two days or so before they were up and running. We’re adding to the conversation; sometimes when you put something on the web you don’t know exactly what impact it’s having.

NEED: That’s an amazing anecdote of how it inspired so many people to get involved with Kiva. Is there anything else you’d like to tell our readers about iWitness?

iWitness: They should probably know, because we don’t promote it very much, that we won The Webby for the best news and politics video series on the web this year. And we’re developing a new tool where people can both webcam in their questions for upcoming interviews, and reach out to us. … We want to make this a very interactive and dynamic way to communicate with people. … They might be in a place like Iran designing a solar-powered project that we might be interested in. It’s both a way to connect with people in crisis situations but also with people who are creating solutions, like Kiva. We try to straddle that line of being in hotspots like Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, and dealing with solutions as well.

Kiva

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 9:00 am and is filed under Interviews, NEED Magazine, Organizations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.