Photo Focused: NPR Interactive Documentary Wins Top Multimedia Honors

Radio in color? This was said by Morning Edition Host Steve Inskeep as he wrapped a radio story on one of the earliest color photographers. That story was part of an interactive documentary that is earning acclaim across the multimedia industry. Radio in color, indeed.

Combining on-air and online elements in the documentary, Lost And Found: Discover A Black-And-White Era in Full Color, tells the story of 1930s-era photographer and hobbyist Charles W. Cushman, who's vast body of work over 30 years was discovered recently, rather by accident.

The brains behind the documentary are Claire O'Neill, multimedia producer and editor of The Picture Show blog on npr.org, and Wes Lindamood, from the NPR UX Design team.

This year, "Lost and Found" won first place in the Feature Story category, first place in Innovation, as well as Best In Show from the White House News Photographers Association (WHNPA). The project also took third place in the prestigious World Press Multimedia competition, honorable mention in the National Press Photographers Association's (NPPA's) Best of Photojournalism contest and a silver medal in Best of Digital Design from the Society for News Design.

Experimenting With Popcorn.js

The Cushman photos were originally intended for a blog post at The Picture Show, but O'Neill said, "I had such great tape from [the first two interviews], it seemed like kind of a waste to do just a blog post." So she took the story to Lindamood, who's user experience team focuses on all things digital from NPR.

"He just had so many ideas," she said. Lindamood had just begun working with a new media framework called Popcorn.js and wanted to use it to tell a story in "a more rich and immersive way" on NPR, he says.

In the process of telling Cushman's story, O'Neill and Lindamood created a customized storytelling platform built to showcase his compelling life through the very images that defined it. One that enabled viewers to better experience the literal twists and turns of his life, navigating road trips and an attempted murder among other things.

"I see so much potential in audio-driven, long-form storytelling," Lindamood said.

Working In The Gaps

O'Neill and Lindamood started producing the piece during NPR's Serendipity Day. They also worked on lunch or coffee breaks, after work and during any free time in their schedules. After three months of working in the gaps, the finished piece was published.

While "Lost and Found" has been widely recognized by industry awards, O'Neill is sure to emphasize that awards "shouldn't be why you do what you do."

In May 2012, Lindamood joined NPR as senior interaction designer. With a background in visual design, journalism and front-end development, he likes to describe his job as turning "user needs and business goals into technically elegant user experiences."

O'Neill's start at NPR began as an intern in January 2009. Now, four years later, The Picture Show blog along with her other multimedia work, has been honored by the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), WHNPA and Webby Awards, among others.

Working in the NPR multimedia department is perfect for O'Neill because she loves the depth of content she is able to explore. "We are unattached to a specific beat...we get to do deep dives," she said.

NPR is grounded in storytelling, and whether it's by mixing audio and visuals, or through new, interactive platforms, our visual teams are always looking for new and better ways to do just that. In "Lost and Found," which is built on O'Neill's background in visual storytelling and Lindamood's experience in digital design, this duo found such a sweet spot: radio in color.

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Marie McGrory is a spring 2013 intern on NPR's Multimedia team. She was born and raised in NYC, is a lefty and loves temporary tattoos.

Radio in Color

Lost And Found: Discover A Black-And-White Era in Full Color By the numbers:

• Photos in the collection: 14,500
• Amount of time it takes to sort through 14,500 photos: Too much
• Number of pet raccoons featured: 1

Follow The Picture Show Blog

Twitter: @NPRPictureShow

More from this Project

Check out two other projects inspired by this technology, and the source code journalists/designers can take our skeleton and add to it, like Mother Jones did. From the Bronx to the Bench: The Family Photos of Justice Sotomayer (source code) NPR Music Presents: In Memoriam (source code)

Health Officials Decry Texas' Snubbing Of Medicaid Billions

The state of Texas is turning down billions of federal dollars that would have paid for health care coverage for 1.5 million poor Texans.

By refusing to participate in Medicaid expansion, which is part of the Affordable Care Act, the state will leave on the table an estimated $100 billion over the next decade.

Texas' share of the cost would have been just 7 percent of the total, but for Gov. Rick Perry and the state's Republican-dominated Legislature, even $1 in the name of "Obamacare" was a dollar too much.

"Texas will not be held hostage by the Obama administration's attempt to force us into this fool's errand of adding more than a million Texans to a broken system," Perry said.

Texas Republicans have moved steadily to the right — to where the very concept of public health insurance of any kind is looked at through narrowed eyes. Still, it's not easy to walk away from $100 billion from the federal government to help your state's poor, elderly and disabled, especially when you have powerful stakeholders like hospitals, doctors and cities clamoring for the state to take the money for their sakes.

Texas hospitals stand to lose about $7 billion.

"I don't think we will be OK, actually, especially when you consider the state cut us about $700 million a year in Medicaid payments because of the budget shortfall," says John Hawkins, a senior vice president at the Texas Hospital Association. "Now we're dealing with sequestration, which is another 2 percent.

"If you look at the president's budget, there's some additional cuts to hospitals, so I don't think it is a sustainable business model going forward if we don't do the expansion."

If your country has no national health insurance, but your citizens don't have the stomach to watch the uninsured die on the hospital sidewalk, something's got to give. So there's a national expectation that doctors and hospitals will provide these uninsured populations mostly uncompensated care. And so they do. But few in the industry think this is the way to operate.

Tom Banning, chief executive officer of the Texas Academy of Family Physicians, lobbied hard but unsuccessfully for Medicaid expansion. He's beside himself with frustration.

"These people don't choose to get sick. When they do, they're going to access our health care system at the most inefficient and expensive point, which is the emergency room," Banning says. "And it's going to cost the taxpayers and it's going to cost employers a lot of money to care for them. And we're going to be forgoing billions of dollars that the feds have set aside for the state to pay for and provide this care."

This is not about money — if it were, Texas would be taking it. This is about Obamacare. It's widely believed in Austin that Perry is seriously considering another run for president — this time without the "oops." His base is Tea Party Republicans across the country. While it might cost $100 billion for the privilege, Perry is going to be able to stand in front of them and say, "I said no to Obama when he tried to bribe my state with health care coverage for the poor."

And since it's widely believed that these would-be Medicaid recipients probably don't vote or, if they do vote, they vote for Democrats, there's no political price to pay for snubbing them.

Still, there are some Republican legislators who feel bad about not taking the money.

Rep. John Zerwas tried to craft some sort of compromise that never mentioned Medicaid expansion, but he couldn't get it out of committee — because for Texas Republicans, the very words "health care" now carry the stink of Obamacare.

Zerwas points to "the political realities of having to run for office again in two years and how much explaining would I have to do as a candidate around a vote that could very easily be framed as a supporter of promoting Obamacare."

Texas Republicans aren't worried about the reaction from the left for voting down Medicaid expansion, they're worried they might get a primary challenge from a Tea Party candidate if the words "health care" pass their lips on the floor of the Legislature. That is, if they're not already a Tea Party candidate, which many are.

For at least the next two years and probably longer, Medicaid expansion in Texas is dead. What this all means is that more than a million Texans who might have received health care coverage will remain one serious illness or one bad accident away from bankruptcy. And an estimated $100 billion that would have been spent buying health care in Texas will now go somewhere else.

Radio in Color

Lost And Found: Discover A Black-And-White Era in Full Color By the numbers:

• Photos in the collection: 14,500
• Amount of time it takes to sort through 14,500 photos: Too much
• Number of pet raccoons featured: 1

Follow The Picture Show Blog

Twitter: @NPRPictureShow

More from this Project

Check out two other projects inspired by this technology, and the source code journalists/designers can take our skeleton and add to it, like Mother Jones did. From the Bronx to the Bench: The Family Photos of Justice Sotomayer (source code) NPR Music Presents: In Memoriam (source code)

Georges Moustaki, Who Wrote Songs For Edith Piaf, Dies

Georges Moustaki, one of France's most beloved songwriters, died Thursday in Nice after a long illness. He was 79. Moustaki was known for infusing French song with sounds from around the world.

In 1959, Moustaki wrote the lyrics to Edith Piaf's international hit "Milord," a song about a working-class girl who falls for an English gentleman. At the time, Piaf was in her early 40s and the handsome Moustaki was in his mid-20s.

Piaf was smitten with Moustaki's music, as well as his great charm. Carolyn Burke, who wrote a biography of Piaf, says the two were lovers. They wrote Milord while they were on vacation.

"He started writing words down on a paper napkin. One of them was the word, 'Milord.' Piaf chose it, drew a circle around it and told him, 'Start from there,'" Burke says.

Although Moustaki did not write the music for "Milord," Piaf liked how his compositions were flavored with jazz and styles that went beyond France's borders. She sang a number of his songs, including "Le Gitan et La Fille" and "Eden Blues."

Moustaki was born in Egypt to Greek parents and moved to France when he was a teenager. He wrote poetry and worked as a journalist for an Egyptian newspaper. As a solo artist, Moustaki became popular for songs about freedom and individuality. His first hit — "Le Meteque" (or "The Mongrel") — is about being an outsider.

In one of the many tributes being written today, France's culture minister wrote that Georges Moustaki was "an artist committed to humanist values."

Radio in Color

Lost And Found: Discover A Black-And-White Era in Full Color By the numbers:

• Photos in the collection: 14,500
• Amount of time it takes to sort through 14,500 photos: Too much
• Number of pet raccoons featured: 1

Follow The Picture Show Blog

Twitter: @NPRPictureShow

More from this Project

Check out two other projects inspired by this technology, and the source code journalists/designers can take our skeleton and add to it, like Mother Jones did. From the Bronx to the Bench: The Family Photos of Justice Sotomayer (source code) NPR Music Presents: In Memoriam (source code)

To 'Fill The Void,' A Choice With A Personal Cost

Driving home from a screening of the ravishing new Israeli film Fill the Void, I caught sight of a young man in full Hasidic garb, trying to coax his toddler son across a busy Los Angeles street. My first thought was, "He's a boy himself, barely old enough to be a father, and they both look so pale."

My second was, "I wonder what his life feels like?" This is the more open mindset that director Rama Burshtein asks from audiences going into her first feature, a love poem to the ultra-Orthodox world as seen from within.

An insider by choice rather than by birth, Burshtein grew up in New York and only committed herself to Hasidic Judaism while at film school in Israel. Since then she has devoted herself to nurturing a small but growing cinema of Orthodox (Haredi) Judaism, especially for women.

That's pretty novel right there. Filmmakers tend to be a secular if not downright anti-conservative lot, which may be one reason why the handful of movies set in a Jewish religious milieu have essentially been hatchet jobs. Boaz Yakin's A Price Above Rubies (1998) and Amos Gitai's Kadosh (1999), both made by men, latched ferociously on to the second-class and abused status of women in Orthodox Jewish society, and saw nothing else.

Burshtein refuses to engage with the culture wars that flare fiercely between secular and religious types in Israel; in fact she's trying to avoid types of any kind, which may be why secular audiences and critics have embraced her rapturous depiction of a community living its life, more separate from than at odds with the society beyond.

Fill the Void is set in Tel Aviv (where Burshtein lives) rather than in Jerusalem, where most Israeli ultra-Orthodox live. But the outside world might be anywhere, for all the time the movie spends beyond the cloistered walls of a watertight community mobilizing to resolve an internal crisis.

No one feels oppressed here, or tries to escape. We meet Shira (Hadas Yaron), a dewy 18-year-old beauty, in a lather of girlish excitement after she catches a glimpse of the side-curled young Hasid who's been picked out as her future husband. But Shira's joy at finding her beshert doesn't last. When her older sister dies in childbirth, the wedding is put on hold.

Then Shira's mother, terrified of losing the sister's newborn baby when the widower, Yochay (Yiftach Klein), considers marrying a widow in Belgium, sets about engineering a match between between Shira and Yochay. Desolate enough at having her own hopes dashed, Shira is downright paralyzed by the ethical and emotional implications of marrying her beloved sister's husband, whom she has loved as a brother.

Other complications intrude to stack the deck against an orderly transition to a settled life; none of them, though, involves a direct challenge to a social order that many secular people argue consigns women to secondary roles as helpmeets.

And it's true that the stakes are low here. Shira's dilemma may be agonizing for her, but it involves no violation of Jewish law, threatens no status quo. The community's kindly rabbi implores her to consult her own feelings. One wonders how he would respond to a request to take a year off to travel by herself, or to train as a rabbi.

In light of the recent violent protests among ultra-Orthodox men (and women) against women who claimed the right to pray as men do at Jerusalem's Western Wall, some would call Kill the Void a roaring case of special pleading. And perhaps Burshtein does take a willfully rosy view of women's standing within the Haredi community. But if she may be willfully blind to politics, she excels at setting before us, in passionately intimate detail, a world to which she is devoted — and one in which women are placed front and center.

Ambience is everything in this director's gorgeous scene-setting. There's nothing remotely monkish or drab about the lavish physicality and rich lighting that infuses a sexually modest subculture with sensual pleasure and — yes — romance. In one achingly lovely scene, Shira squeezes out her grief in the plaintive notes of an accordion as Yochay sways in a hammock, his baby slumbering peacefully on his chest.

Elsewhere a richly soulful Hebrew rendition of Psalm 137 ("If I forget thee, O Jerusalem ...") underscores the transformative power of communal ritual, whose central premise — act, and the feelings will follow — guides Shira toward a decision.

There's nothing pat about this: In the final shot of the movie, on her wedding night, a young woman stands with her back against a wall. What is that look on her face? Is it doubt about the choice she's made? Fright? Or awe before the mystery of her own, and all, existence?

Radio in Color

Lost And Found: Discover A Black-And-White Era in Full Color By the numbers:

• Photos in the collection: 14,500
• Amount of time it takes to sort through 14,500 photos: Too much
• Number of pet raccoons featured: 1

Follow The Picture Show Blog

Twitter: @NPRPictureShow

More from this Project

Check out two other projects inspired by this technology, and the source code journalists/designers can take our skeleton and add to it, like Mother Jones did. From the Bronx to the Bench: The Family Photos of Justice Sotomayer (source code) NPR Music Presents: In Memoriam (source code)

Breaking Down Obama's New Blueprint For Fighting Terrorism

Ever since the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. search for a coherent counterterrorism strategy has revolved around three basic questions:

1. How do we locate suspected terrorists?

2. Once located, how do we go after them?

3. If captured, what do we do with them?

In a major speech at the National Defense University in Washington on Thursday, President Obama addressed all three questions that have been the source of shifting policies and fierce national debates for over a decade.

While the president is sure to face continuing criticism from both the left and the right, he laid out his blueprint for counterterrorism in his second term and spoke of a day when the country would no longer be on permanent war footing.

On question No. 1, locating the terrorists, Obama emphasized that the terrorism threat had changed dramatically over the past decade.

The U.S. is no longer hunting for a large, centralized al-Qaida that is deeply rooted in one place (Afghanistan), headed by a prominent leader in Osama bin Laden and possessing the capacity to carry out large-scale attacks.

"Now make no mistake: Our nation is still threatened by terrorists. From Benghazi to Boston, we have been tragically reminded of that truth. We must recognize, however, that the threat has shifted and evolved from the one that came to our shores on 9/11," Obama said.

"Lethal yet less capable al-Qaida affiliates," he continued. "Threats to diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad. Homegrown extremists. This is the future of terrorism."

In contrast to former President George W. Bush, Obama has opposed a large military footprint in favor of smaller, more focused operations and a preference to seek out partnerships with other countries, even problematic ones such as Pakistan and Yemen.

"We must define our effort not as a boundless 'global war on terror' — but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America. In many cases, this will involve partnerships with other countries," Obama said.

Pursuing Terrorists

On question No. 2, the pursuit of terrorism suspects, the president's signature program has been the widespread use of drones, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in countries where the U.S. is not at war, such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Obama expressed a preference to capture suspects alive.

"But despite our strong preference for the detention and prosecution of terrorists, sometimes this approach is foreclosed," the president said.

He reserved the right to use drone strikes when it is not feasible for U.S. forces or a host country to detain suspects, describing such strikes as effective, legal and moral.

The frequency of drone strikes went up sharply under Obama during his first years in office compared with Bush. But the number has been coming down recently. According to the New America Foundation, which tracks drone attacks, there were more than 100 in Pakistan in 2010. This year there have been a dozen.

The CIA has played a leading role in the drone strikes, and this has drawn criticism from those who say the agency should focus on collecting intelligence rather than carrying out lethal operations. Administration and military officials have indicated that the military is expected to take the lead in drone operations, though Obama did not address this explicitly in his speech.

The president has come under frequent criticism, particularly from liberals, for the secrecy surrounding the drone campaign. The president spoke to this audience as he set down his guidelines for drone strikes:

"America does not take strikes when we have the ability to capture individual terrorists — our preference is always to detain, interrogate and prosecute them. America cannot take strikes wherever we choose — our actions are bound by consultations with partners, and respect for state sovereignty. America does not take strikes to punish individuals — we act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people, and when there are no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat. And before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured — the highest standard we can set."

The Prosecution Of Terrorism Suspects

On question No. 3, prosecuting suspects, Obama said the U.S. had at times violated its own principles.

"And in some cases, I believe we compromised our basic values — by using torture to interrogate our enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law," he said.

He again pledged to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison, something he promised at the beginning of his first term in 2009, though he has made minimal progress.

A total of 166 suspects are still being held, and many are on hunger strikes. Roughly a third of all detainees are from Yemen and have been cleared for release. But Obama said Congress had made it difficult for the administration to either release the prisoners or to put them on trial in the U.S.

"Look at the current situation, where we are force-feeding detainees who are holding a hunger strike. Is that who we are? Is that something that our founders foresaw? Is that the America we want to leave to our children?" the president asked.

The president also called for a site in the United States where terrorism suspects could be tried before military commissions. At present, only a small number of such cases are underway at Guantanamo.

"To the greatest extent possible, we will transfer detainees who have been cleared to go to other countries. Where appropriate, we will bring terrorists to justice in our courts and military justice system. And we will insist that judicial review be available for every detainee."

Radio in Color

Lost And Found: Discover A Black-And-White Era in Full Color By the numbers:

• Photos in the collection: 14,500
• Amount of time it takes to sort through 14,500 photos: Too much
• Number of pet raccoons featured: 1

Follow The Picture Show Blog

Twitter: @NPRPictureShow

More from this Project

Check out two other projects inspired by this technology, and the source code journalists/designers can take our skeleton and add to it, like Mother Jones did. From the Bronx to the Bench: The Family Photos of Justice Sotomayer (source code) NPR Music Presents: In Memoriam (source code)