Cody Cheng: I think there's something really, really riveting about the way that, as students, we were the media who was making this protest, this assembly of students, publicly known…I felt really, really empowered when I was holding that camera, shooting footage.
Diya Khetan: Welcome back to the Bruno Brief. My name is Diya Khetan and I’m a podcast host at The Herald. This week, we’ll be speaking with members of The Herald’s writing, photo and video teams to learn about how they collaborated to provide multimedia coverage of a January 30 anti-ICE protest, which drew a crowd of over 1,000 participants from the College Hill community.
Here is Metro section editor Michelle Bi.
Michelle Bi: My name is Michelle. I use she/her pronouns, and I am currently a Metro section editor at The Herald covering state politics and justice and city hall and crime.
Diya: Michelle and her co-writer, University News editor Zarina Hamilton, began the coverage process several days before the protest due to the expected scale of the march.
Michelle: Like three days before the march happened, we found contacts in student groups that organized the protests, such as Brown Rise Up and Sunrise Brown and local city groups like the deportation defense network, and we began speaking to those people before the actual day of the protest.
Diya: That preparation proved essential on the day of the rally.
Michelle: On the day of the protest…we recorded all the speeches, interviewed people who had shown up to be part of the demonstration. We walked around with them for a few hours. We stayed until the very end, and after that, it had been easy … because we had done all of these pre-interviews from one-on-one organizers, not in the chaos of the protest crowd in the march.
Diya: The protest’s large scale also made it more difficult to cover.
Michelle: Once that many people gather in one space, it gets kind of confusing. I would say logistically covering these kinds of things is always just kind of challenging because it's such a chaotic environment, and obviously we have to be really strategic and careful with the facts that we get.
Diya: The protest’s busy atmosphere also brought some challenges to the photo team’s coverage. Here is Kaia Yalamanchili, a photo chief at The Herald.
Kaia Yalamanchili: With a lot of these walkouts and protests and rallies, communicating between photographers can kind of sometimes be difficult. There's always that kind of risk of missing context. But I think with things like this, what we did is a more general picture.
Diya: The photo team sent out photographers to individually cover different aspects of the march.
Kaia: I don't really like to clump up photographers, because then I feel like they get a lot of the same shots. So if we can, I just send them to do their own thing.
Diya: The team provided photos for the article Michelle co-wrote, and for a photo essay published a few days later. Meanwhile, the video team collected various types of footage to compile into one edited video that was posted on The Herald’s social media. One of the team’s responsibilities was collecting “B-roll” footage, which is used under voiceovers to provide dynamic visuals from the event. The team also interviewed protest organizers and attendees. Here’s one of our video chiefs, Cody Cheng. He says the team…
Cody: did a really good job. They found a lot of people with a lot of really, really great things to say about the protests that we could put in our video.
Diya: After the team gathered all of the footage, they had to sort through it all and choose what to include in the final video.
Cody: Usually what ends up happening is we have, like, maybe, like an hour worth of footage and like another, like 20 minutes of B roll to go through. So what we do is we just sit down, we listen to everything, and we talk about which, like B roll clips, or which interview clips that we like.
Diya: The process moves from rough cuts, to detailed edits and final detail-oriented adjustments.
Cody: That also takes a really, really long time, maybe like three or four hours.
Diya: Throughout the coverage process, members of each team often coordinated with one other.
Kaia: We get the draft from the writers while they're doing it, so we can figure out where to best embed photos and how to caption them, and stuff like that, as well as what's best to cover depending on what the headline is, and stuff like that. The photo team also took a good amount of video for the video team to use in their kind of breakdown of the walkout.
Diya: The writing team also collaborated with the video team in the interviewing process.
Michelle: We helped write up some of the questions for them. So between the protesters that we interviewed, whose interviews were printed in the print article that we did on the website, and the people who were in the video the video team put out, there was a lot of question overlap.
Diya: For some members of The Herald, this wasn’t their first time covering ICE activity.
Michelle: I've been covering ICE for a while now because activity from ICE officials has been ramping up in Providence, if you look at the past few months.
Diya: For events like the January 30 protest, Kaia, Cody and Michelle said multimedia components are important in order to provide audiences with a more complete understanding of what is happening.
Michelle: It's like this dynamic motion through the city with so many different perspectives being offered. And I think that was like a really helpful thing for print journalism to capture.
Kaia: Visuals pull people in a lot. Being able to actually see it with your own eyes, even if it's through a photo, does such wonders to painting that picture in your head.
Cody: I think the videos are definitely a lot more accessible, because a lot of people follow the Brown Daily Herald Instagram, and people these days like to consume media digitally. It's also a lot more punchy, a lot quicker, and it's more geared for the more Gen Z type audience that the Herald has.
Diya: Michelle, Kaia, Cody, thank you all for joining us today and sharing more about your work in covering the anti-ICE walkout and march.
Next week, join us to hear how The Herald and our creative non-fiction magazine, post-, develop our daily crossword puzzles.
Thanks again for tuning in to the Bruno Brief. Today’s episode was produced, edited and scripted by Rachel Wicker, Diya Khetan and Talia LeVine . If you like what you hear, subscribe to the Bruno Brief wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next week.
