Bay Area Toxic

West Oakland Story Moves Forward

With a major vote on the Comprehensive Truck Management Plan coming up on June 2, my goal as the Newsdesk.org representative is to help get our coverage of diesel exhaust, the conflict between union and non-union truckers, and the needs of the West Oakland community itself properly represented!

No easy task! This is an emotional and complex story.

I've been thrilled to work with Kwan and Kim so far -- they are aces, have really clear understandings of the story, and lots of skill in the telling. Kwan's prose moves fast and packs context; Kim's photos -- he IS a Pulitzer-winner, after all -- pack more than thousand words each.

(Seriously -- who woulda thunk an advisory board meeting would be an opportunity for action photography? And yet Kim captured that exactly -- the emotion, the confrontation, the different faces and communities and their needs.)

Also, I'm super-pleased with the audio drops ... they relay the fever-pitch emotion of the moment where words and even images fall short.

This last article was a DIY type of multimedia reporting. We just used whatever open-source resources for image, text and sound we could access, and brought it all together in a central article on Newsdesk.org. 

For our NEXT piece on this, we're shooting for something much more coherent as a continuous multimedia piece combining photography and audio, with the goal of revealing the communities, the industries, the people and the institutions affected by the issue.

Thanks for your support and stay tuned for updates!