JOVRNALISM’s immersive documentary Barnstorming Through Barriers: The Katherine Cheung Story is a finalist for The Webby Award – Video – Student category.
This Spring 2021 project on the first licensed Chinese woman pilot was published across ABC-owned news stations.
This is JOVRNALISM’s third nomination in four years and has already won two Webby Awards.
Go to this URL to vote: https://bit.ly/webby2022
You can see the project here: https://katherinecheung.jovrnalism.io/
JOVRNALISM was invited to attend the Doha Forum in Qatar and present its award-winning, immersive work
Six JOVRNALISM alums and Professor Hernandez were flown to Qatar as special guests of the kingdom after some government officials experienced immersive projects during a USC Center on Public Diplomacy summer workshop.
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Even before Ruby Yuan set foot on campus, he knew what type of education he wanted to get. The journalism major, who will be graduating in 2020, was interested to find the intersection between journalism and technology and he knew USC Annenberg was the place to explore this.
“Three days before I came to Annenberg, I read a piece about Syrian refugees and virtual reality,” Yuan said. “I was like, how cool would that be if I could somehow persuade my school to make a journalism class about VR?”
During the new student assembly that year, Robert Hernandez, associate professor of professional practice, introduced himself and his JOVRNALISM — the “VR” stands for virtual reality — class to the new cohort of undergraduates.
Yuan was hooked — and has been ever since. Yuan, who is also the executive editor of Annenberg Media this year, has been named the first Emerging Technologies Fellow at USC Annenberg, an opportunity funded by the Heeger Brothers’ Fund. The fund was established by USC alumni Robbie Heeger (BA, broadcast and digital journalism, 2012) and Adam Heeger (BA, business administration, 2011). Robbie Heeger took Hernandez’ class while in college, and through this gift, he and his brother wanted to help connect journalism students with the changing technological landscape while increasing awareness of the JOVRNALISM program and power of virtual reality storytelling.
“Ruby embodied what I envisioned for this fellowship: someone who is genuinely passionate about it,” said Hernandez, who is overseeing the gift. “He is phenomenal in terms of his work and his integrity and how he represents Annenberg. He lives and breathes this school to an obsessive level.”
Read the entire profile here: https://annenberg.usc.edu/news/spotlight/journalism-fellow-dives-virtual-reality
For the new project, JOVRNALISM partners with PBS SoCal’s To Foster Change and Peace4Kids, a non-profit organization that aims to build a supportive and warm community for foster youth in South Los Angeles.
Peace4Kids has provided mentor programs, leadership programs, and family meals to teach and care for foster youth, according to its website.
“We work very intensely with transitional age youth (age 16 to high school graduation) and we thought it would be best to highlight their stories using the virtual reality platform,” said Miriam Cortez-Cáceres, the program coordinator at Peace4Kids.
The project aims to produce foster youth’s stories through emerging technologies such as virtual reality(VR) and Snapchat augmented reality(AR) lenses, according to USC professor Robert Hernandez.
Read the whole story here: http://www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2019/10/22/usc-jovrnalism-to-produce-immersive-stories-about-foster-care-system-in-partnership-with-peace4kids-and-kcet/
Sitting on a Los Angeles street curb, my partner Alex Li and I were waiting the police siren to stop so we could continue interviewing Tim Sterry and Daisy Kukuruza about their romantic relationship while experiencing homelessness and living on the street.
“Why aren’t more stories like this told by media?” Sterry asked, pointing out that media coverage usually portraits the homeless community in a negative light.
Unfortunately, as a journalist, I can’t disagree with Sterry’s statement.
When the 2018 Fall semester began, our entire JOVRNALISM class had two weeks of brainstorming ideas. The class was already cautious to avoid reinforcing typical, negative stereotypes about the housing insecure community. Our stories ideas ranged from police harassment to sexual assault in the homeless community. Ultimately, our project didn’t used any of our ideas.
One question we often get about our resulting project, Homeless Realities, is how did we connect with this community, which is often standoffish and reluctant to be have its stories told by the media.
It wasn’t easy.
As part of our reporting, a few of us volunteered at several non-profit organizations, trying to contact with the community there, but, while we gain credibility with the organizations, it didn’t successfully lead to ideal sources.
We decided on a different approach: In partnership with the non-profits, we organized a multi-day workshop to teach selected members of the homeless community how to shoot in 360/VR and work with them to tell stories their own stories.
Professor Robert Hernandez leads a workshop with project partners inside the downtown Los Angeles Central Library.
Then they each pitched the story they wanted to tell through immersive.
None of the pitched stories were even close to our class’ initial brainstorming ideas. What resulted were stories about a homeless woman running a small business out of her car; experiencing housing insecurity while working two jobs; cooking for church to help others; being a homeless musician trying to perform; using art to help with mental illness and homelessness; and, of course, a young couple in love trying to foster intimacy while living publicly on the streets.
At the time of this project I was a managing editor of USC Annenberg Media and no stranger to approving news pitches.
I have to be honest, with each pitch the participants made I would ask myself typical news editors’ questions like “why is this newsworthy?” or “what’s the news peg?” As editor, it would have been difficult for me to approve these story ideas.
I realized that I was worrying too much because their honest and accurate stories weren’t being experienced – let alone pitched – outside of the homeless community.
Homeless Realities highlights the diligence, dream, arts, talents, service and love found within the homeless community, like any other community. When we first publicly premiered the final pieces at the downtown library, someone from the audience noted that all our stories seem positive and asked if we should look into the dark side of being homeless.
Remember, we did not choose these stories. We empowered the community to tell their stories, the ones they wanted the world to know most. JOVRNALISM came to the community with a platform to tell their stories, instead of the typical news media approach of parachuting into a community hoping to tell stories on their behalf. Media often go in with a story in mind, looking for sources that fit their predetermined narrative.
In our project, these stories come directly from the community. These stories are underreported. These stories deserve to be heard.
Homeless Realities is an immersive series about homelessness and housing instability in Los Angeles produced by JOVRNALISM from USC Annenberg. The series is comprised of text articles, videos, 360 immersive videos and augmented reality experiences.
The students from the Fall 2018 class also explored photogrammetry and videogrammetry in hopes to create 3D assets for the augmented reality experience.
Considering the challenges around AR distribution — often done via customized apps with small download numbers — the class also explored creating and publishing the AR experiences on the Snapchat Lens Studio platform.
Read how we did the custom Snapchat experience in this tutorial: https://medium.com/@jovrnalism/hacking-dancing-hotdog-for-immersive-journalism-2d0695bf6522
USC Annenberg student Kaidi Ruby Yuan and professor Robert Hernandez were in New York to represent the entire JOVRNALISM team that produced The Deported.
The project, which launched after the Spring 2018 semester, was given the People’s Voice Award in the student category.
As part of The Webby Awards tradition, the JOVRNALISM team had to come up with a 5-word acceptance speech.
We all agreed on “Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable,” but that was six words. After much debate, we decided to go with “Comfort the afflicted. Fight on!”
There were several celebrities on hand receiving awards for their work, ranging from Issa Rae to Gritty.
They also created several social media shareable moments, like this bullet time video:
Download high-res of this photo
Download the videos here:
Sketch Fab is an online marketplace and community that makes it easy for people to find and publish 3-Dimensional content to the web. The company, which started in Paris, began because its creators were frustrated by the lack of mediums that existed for people to share their 3D models with friends. Hours of labor would be spent creating 3D models with no way of fully sharing them. Due to this demand within the VR and AR markets, Sketch Fab has now grown to have over 2 million registered users, 2 million 3D models, 8 million monthly visitors, and 1 billion page views since its launch.
The community is made up of all kinds of users, from designers and architects, to game studios and schools. Sketch Fab’s goal is to eventually turn 3D into a mainstream format. What makes this platform exiting for JOVRNALISM, is that Sketch Fab allows creators to showcase their models to millions of users instantly. Therefore, students can take their 3D models that they produce throughout the semester, and display them for the world to see! To learn more about this marketplace, click here.
Feb. 19, 2019
Did you know that you don’t have to be a technology guru or expert to be able to create one-of-a-kind Snapchat lens filters? JOVRNALISM has been using Snapchat filters as a mechanism to bring stories to life over the past few semesters. Snapchat’s augmented reality platform is especially useful because it allows creators to import artwork and publish the lens link directly to the web, so that anyone who has access to the code is able to instantly see the filter through the app.
As part of JOVRNALISM Spring 2019 curriculum, students were required to learn how to use the interface of Snapchat Lens Studio so they too can create unique, enticing visual filters. Taught by a JOVRNALISM alumni, Chiat, who happens to be a Snapchat Lens Studio superstar, each student in class produced a filter that was approved and published to the web. Over the course of the semester, students will be working on projects that use interactive Snapchat lenses to showcase the realities of climate change, environmental sustainability, and more.
To follow along on more projects like this, be sure to follow @JOVRNALISM on Instagram!
Thank you again for the class lesson, Chiat!
The Fall 2018 JOVRNALISM (JOURN 489) class had a special guest lecturer earlier in the semester: Rony Abovitz, the CEO of Magic Leap, one of the most talked about companies in the emerging Mixed Reality (they call it Spatial Computing) industry.
On the heels of the much anticipated LEAPcon event, Abovitz didn’t just Skype into the class, he “beamed” in via a telepresence robot shipped from Plantation, FL, the company’s headquarters. (more…)
This past week, JOVRNALISM traveled to Catalina Island to visit the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies. The institute, which is an extension of USC Dornsife College of Letters and Sciences, researches different ways to implement environmental sustainability into everyday life.
