Diego Graglia, journalist

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Our contest victory was so great it deserved coverage on a local newspaper.

I’ve been doing video and television work since 1997, when I was part of a team that represented my school, Universidad Nacional de Misiones, in a national journalism contest called “El periodismo que viene” (Upcoming Journalism.) We beat other Journalism programs from around the country to take the big prize: an internship at national news channel Todo Noticias and its parent company, broadcast network Canal 13.

That was my first experience in national media in Buenos Aires. I was assigned to Canal 13‘s midnight newscast “En Síntesis”, where I worked as a producer. The show was anchored by famed newsman Santo Biasatti — who may have said ‘hello’ once, though I’m not 100% sure.

The time spent in the capital helped me realize a couple things: that all sorts of crazy people call TV newsrooms –”You don’t see that the hammer and the sickle are behind this?” one lady used to ask me–; and that I was prepared to join the big leagues in the big city. That is what I did a few months later when I won a fellowship at Clarín over some 100 other candidates.

While at Columbia Journalism School, I took a video production skills course so that I could go behind the camera and the editing suite. A classmate and I shot and edited these two pieces:

- A profile of Alberto Arroyo, known as The Mayor of Central Park, the pioneer who started jogging around the park’s Reservoir decades ago and who kept showing up every day while his health allowed him too. (Sadly, Alberto passed away in March 2010.)

- A story about plans to create a park on an abandoned elevated railway on New York’s West side, the now famous High Line.

During the Road to the Latino Vote roadtrip in 2008 (read more), I shot and edited a series of video interviews with Latino activists and local leaders in the communities we visited. The camera was a handheld still photo camera, so the image quality wasn’t great, but the goal was to use the videos to complement the rest of the content in a multimedia blog. Watch the full series here.

Another format on which I enjoy working a lot is the audio slideshows we see on more and more news websites these days. I consider them very powerful storytelling vehicles and I think they can look and sound great while resonating deeply with the public.

This is one slideshow I produced from start to finish for Feet in 2 Worlds recently in Mexico City.