Against the Deadline

The atmosphere is tense at the Boston Globe headquarters on May 3rd, 2009. In just a few hours, the employees of the paper will learn their fate. Will the New York Times shut the New England institution down? How much will the unions sacrifice to save it?

This piece provides a glimpse into a brief moment in history, when the fate of New England’s paper of record – and its 1400 employees – was unknown.

The presses would roll later that night, but in the moment, nothing was certain.

As a final group project for my multimedia journalism class at UMass Amherst, we were tasked with covering the problems the Boston Globe faced. For my part, I was to create a couple of videos to accompany text pieces written by my teammates. I was lucky enough to film in the newsroom on the day of the New York Times-imposed deadline. While I wish I had more interviews to work with, I think the resulting piece is fairly compelling.

If you’re interested, you should check out the full package – titled “13th Hour Reprieve” – at Amherst Wire. My words were used for the splash page, and the above video was featured.

I shot the footage with a Sony HDR-HC1, edited in Final Cut Pro, and used a Zoom H4n coupled with Soundtrack Pro to create the voiceover track.

This second piece was intended to be a sidebar to one of the written articles, giving an insiders view into what the much-publicized “lifetime contracts” were.