Every day we read how Europe’s economy is falling to pieces. At the center of the crisis lies Spain. One of every two Spaniards under 30 in unemployed. The government has fallen, and every few months, people fill the streets to protest steep cuts in pensions, health care and education.
We’re three journalists living in Barcelona, and need your help to tell the story of Spain’s “lost generation.”
We’re going to create a rich, multi-media profile of Barcelona using classic on-scene reporting with newer interactive tools. Via Twitter, a Tumblr blog, and some old-school reporting, we’ll get behind the financial statistics and the business pages to tell the on-the-ground, human story of Europe’s economic crisis.
We’ll explore questions such as:
“Is unemployment a different experience in Europe than it is in the US?”
“How do European responses to the crisis differ from American ones? Who do they blame?”
“How are Spanish families coping? Are their day-to-day solutions like American solutions?”
We’ll gather experiences, insights and questions and start reporting. We’ll record interviews with average Spaniards on digital video, plus interview expert sources in other parts of the world, and official sources here.
Our profile of Barcelona amid the crisis will result in three concrete pieces of journalism, to start:
-- a short documentary video.
-- a Sunday magazine-style piece of writing
-- a set of explanatory infographics
We’ll distribute what we create to traditional media outlets, with APM’s help. We’ll also maintain the project Tumblr, with a production blog, and an open call for experiences and questions – so and that’s really where our focus lies, and where our contributors can come to participate in not just helping pay for the story, but shaping it.
When we’ve done that initial reporting, we’ll host a live chat at the project website, to talk about our findings. We’ll also invite some of the people who appear in the stories and respondents to PIN queries too.
Part of our goal is to create a place where Americans facing the economic crisis can interact with Europeans facing similar events in their country. To do all this, we need to buy a couple of things: A few terabytes of computer memory for the cameras. A couple of taxi rides (it’s winter, and the equipment is sensitive). Time in a photo studio to hold the interviews.
But most of our expenses will be to pay for the talents of a graphic designer, and a young local journalist to assist us – both of whom you’ll meet on the project blog.
Beyond documenting Spain’s crisis, we’re also participants. We live here. While reporting, we’re also going to document our own effort to hire someone in Barcelona, and create work for a handful of local people who will work for the project.
Finally, who are we that are doing all these fabulous things?
Videographer Lucija Stojevic is a frequent contributor to The Guardian in London and Global Post in Boston. http://www.noctilucamedia.com.
Reporter Jennifer Baljko works with Worldreader, which provides e-readers and digital books to schools in Ghana and Kenya. She’s was a longtime business reporter in Silicon Valley. http://www.jenniferbaljko.com.
Writer Marc Herman is the author of The Shores of Tripoli and Searching for El Dorado, and is a contributor to The Atlantic. https://marcherman.wordpress.com
Follow us at http://51percentbcn.com/
