Reported by Mat Gallagher:
iECONOMY: Factory Upgrade from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.
The 2013 Pulitzer prize winners, announced this week, include the work of The New York Times video journalist and Newsshooter.com contributor, Jonah Kessel. His video work on The iEconomy series formed part of the portfolio that won the award for Explanatory Reporting. Back in January, Jonah wrote a piece on the making of this series for this blog (see: Do our videos have real life impact?).
The series consists of nine articles, two videos, graphics and a series of photo essays. You can see The iEconomy series on The New York Times site here.
Made in China from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.
Speaking about his two videos, Jonah told us, “The thing that’s probably never been mentioned is that while the Factory Upgrade video is clean, nice and pretty (except for the first 5 seconds when I wasn’t supposed to be filming), the Made in China video was made at a time when Foxconn was both refusing to talk to us and refusing to give us any access. So all of the footage from the first video was taken in a relatively taken “under cover” state. As you can imagine, being white in China, it’s not so easy to go undercover. All of the footage from that video required me to both sneak in and out of the Foxconn compound with gear. There’s layers of fences, security guards, and cameras everywhere … While, the footage isn’t great or on a factory line, Im kind of amazed I got in and out with my memory cards in tact.”
Justine Simons, Senior Producer for Video at The New York Times, added: “it was a wonderful day for all of the award winning reports! It’s an honour for the multimedia departments here at The Times to be recognized for projects like ‘Snowfall’ and the ‘iEconomy’ series as multimedia excellence becomes more important to the Pulitzer jurors every year. As you may imagine, there are large teams of people who contribute to the creation of projects like these, and everyone involved is extremely pleased with this recognition.”
In all The New York Times picked up four prizes: Explanatory Reporting, International Reporting, Investigative Reporting, and Feature Writing. Congratulations to Jonah and the NYT team. We look forward to seeing more hard-hitting but beautifully shot pieces this year.
