Through half a decade of war, a team of 100 Reuters correspondents, photographers, cameramen and support staff have strived to bring the world news from the most dangerous country for the press. This is their testimony – bearing witness to ensure the story of Iraq is not lost.
This short video served as an introduction the the package, a screenshot of the site is below/
Reuters and MediaStorm collaborated to create Bearing Witness: Five Years of the Iraq War, launched to coincide with the war’s 5th anniversary. It was the first project I worked on when I joined MediaStorm and I’m grateful to Brian Storm for trusting me with such a big endeavor right out of the gate.
Reuters video, photography, info-graphics and journalists are showcased in this 5 chapter interactive application created from more than 20 hours of video footage and images selected from 3,600 of the best of Reuters photographs — some published here for the first time. Additional chapters include a timeline of the Iraq War made up of 223 still images and 15 videos, and five maps drawn from dozens of pages of data.
The site also included profiles of three Reuters journalists who covered the war
You can view the profiles of journalists Samia Nakhoul, Goran Tomasevic and Dean Yates. who covered the war for Reuters. Between them, they had more than 23 years combined experience reporting and photographing in Iraq. I produced and edited these pieces too.
The site was packed with information. This is the opening screen of the project. The intro video played first.
As it was a co-production with Reuters, we used stills, video and interviews of their journalists that they supplied. None of the major characters in this story are Americans. All are seasoned journalists, many are locals and most understand Iraq and its people in a completely different fashion. It was a mountain of amazing visuals
The site was rich with information. Besides the introduction seen above, it incorporated three video profiles, a timeline, maps and other links to resources. Sadly, the site no longer exists. On the Reuters side, Jassim Ahmad, the Global Head of Multimedia & Interactive Innovation,sorted through thousands of images and hours of video to narrow it down somewhat to the huge amount I could draw on the the project.
I spoke about my experiences with the project too. Here was an interesting review of the project.
Recognition
2009: Emmy (Nominee) New Approaches To News & Documentary Programming: Current News Coverage
2009: Pictures of the Year International (Finalist) Documentary Project of the Year
2009: Webby (Nominee) News & Politics: Individual Episode
2008: Online Journalism Awards (1st) Multimedia Feature: Large Site