This year’s International Landmine Awareness Day was especially significant to Colombians. In 2007, the South American country reported the highest number of mine and explosive remnants of war casualties in the world. On April 4th, Colombia’s major weekly paper, Semana, published part of my documentary web project, Remnants of War. Last year, I produced a series of black and white photo-slideshows, interactive graphics and timelines to help understand how the country’s rapidly increasing landmine problem affects innocent civilians. I traveled all over Colombia with a Human Rights Watch researcher to gather the material for the multimedia presentation, and later produced a bi-lingual version for their website.

That’s Andres, an 18-year-old survivor of an explosive remnant of war. He picked up what looked like a battery attached to a cable, and the device went off in his hand. Now he has difficulty cultivating coffee and hasn’t returned to school.

His story is all too common. The landmine victims I talked to all faced difficulties returning to a normal life after their accident. Many of them were without adequate medical and financial assistance, unable to continue agricultural work, or were forced to flee from the countryside. Take Manuel, for instance, in this picture to the right. He has to take an all night bus to see his doctor in Medellin, and agricultural work now gives him pain.

Here are the 2006 statistics from the Landmine Monitor report on Colombia:

Mine/ERW casualties in 2006	Total: 1,106 (2005: 1,112)
Casualty analysis	Killed: 226 (169 military, 44 civilians, 12 children, 1 civilian age-unknown) (2005: 282) Injured: 880 (623 military, 198 civilians, 54 children; 5 civilians age-unknown) (2005: 830)
Estimated mine/ERW survivors	4,681
Availability of services in 2006	Unchanged-inadequate
Progress towards survivor assistance aims	Slow (VA24)

Let’s just hope next year’s numbers will be different.

It’s over - my three-month production gig at National Public Radio’s The Bryant Park Project. It came and went like a storm. I barely remember the day-to-day, but my web traces say it was productive.

Here’s a little round up of the multimedia moments:

My first week was the holiday break, when I attended a festivus party and experienced the traditional “Feats of Strength” from a 200-pound guy named Harsh. I caught the moment in photos and audio and told all on the radio show.

My favorite slideshow was about the graphic novel American Born Chinese. The multimedia piece was on the front page of NPR.org and was top three most emailed the entire weekend.

Equally as sophisticated but perhaps more cryptic was the fine art of Iranian-American Shirin Neshat. I created a sort of multimedia artist notebook while her work was on display at the Gladstone Gallery in New York.

I enjoyed collaborating with a couple of Alaskan reporters to create a slideshow about the Rebels to the Pebble, a group of native seventh graders protesting the development of one of the largest gold mines in world. The mining company executive and the rebels’ teacher hashed out some of the issues on the air for 14 minutes.

Then there were the St. Mary’s College students who stripped down to their skivies for a “Polar Bear Splash” during a national week of campus teach-ins about global warming.

Oh, and I got to exercise at least some of my flash skills when I blogged about “Yo” a new gender-neutral pronoun being used in Baltimore schools.

My video debut was about the furor that became of the 42nd street Modell’s sporting goods store the morning after the Giants won the Super Bowl.

Then, the videos about the Project Runway reject who found vindication at Fashion Week and the wake for love on Valentine’s Day eve.

Don’t forget Jake Sasseville, the 22-year old from Maine who’s producing a night show about producing a night show.

And perhaps my favorite video piece, the Brit artists who turned a sweaty nightmare into an installation at Rockefellar Center plaza.

My last slideshow at NPR was about an Anglican-priest hopeful and graphic artist who made a comic book out of the bible.

I might have missed something. But I didn’t even delve into all the radio pieces I produced at the Bryant Park Project, which was my main job. I’m most proud of the Valentine’s Day piece about an evangelical Christian woman who started a sin-free sex toy business. It was number one most emailed on NPR.org for a week straight. The blog post got over a hundred comments. Religion and sex, go figure.

I was put up to it, I swear.

Right before I moved to New York, my video producer friend Charlotte Buchen asked me to be the on-camera reporter for a Current TV piece on ‘eye gazing’ parties. Basically it’s like speed dating, except the flirting happens non-verbally. Rules are simple: Lock eyes with someone for three straight minutes, then move onto the next person. It’s pretty intense. I assure you, my flirting was purely part of the reporting process.

For those of you who haven’t heard, I kind of suddenly picked up and moved to New York City about a month ago. I took a production job with NPR’s new web-focused morning talk show, The Bryant Park Project. That means I won’t be too active on my personal blog, but I’ll be posting regularly on the NPR blog. Watch out for the audio slideshows shooting down the page - a lot of them will be produced by yours truly.

San Francisco is losing thousands of rentals a year, and this 75-year-old grandmother is not putting up with it.

Luz Moran is resisting eviction from the Mission-district home she’s lived in for 35 years.

Here she looks through two years of paperwork from her landlord, who wants to turn her place into Tenancy in Common apartments. Because TICs are unregulated and unregistered, more and more of the middle class are turning to the homeownership model to avoid a move out of the expensive city.

I wrote about the phenomenon for the San Francisco Bay Guardian this week. For weeks, I poured through city documents and housing reports. I snapped the top photo at a rally for Jose Morales, another elderly tenant who is resisting an Ellis Act eviction.

This short slideshow was produced though the Knight-Carnegie Fellowship I did during the summer of 2007. Click on the icon to the right of the print story here.

I spent a night at a San Bernardo mosque while I was reporting on Muslim polygamy in the United States. Note: The people in this slideshow are NOT all polygamous.

It’s just a self portrait of me in the bathroom of an Egyptian restaurant in upstate New York! I was on my way to a Muslim midday prayer service with a 22-year old convert and first wife in a polygamous religious marriage.

The Qur’an says a man may marry up to four wives, and some American converts are practicing the prophet’s lifestyle. So I decided to do a print and radio piece about how it’s done in the United States.

Reporting this story blew all my preconceived notions about Islam and the human heart out of the water. Many of the polygamous wives I interviewed either considered themselves feminists or said their love of God prevented them from feeling jealousy. They were some of the strongest and wisest women I’ve met.

Read the San Francisco Chronicle piece (and comments) here. Or, the slightly longer version on the News21 site.

For a new media journalist, I was pretty damned skeptical of the digital world Second Life. I was one of those who called it a video game (if you’re a new media geek, your hand is probably covering your dropped jaw right about now).

Well, I still don’t think it’s the most ethical of platforms to display journalism, but through my summer religion reporting fellowship, we decided to experiment with it. Multimedia extraordinaire and tech-geek Kara Andrade headed up the project. She produced a panel discussion about faith practices in the virtual world. Avatars were invited to cruise around the tent city we created to show off our religion-oriented stories. My tent, “Plural Living, God Willing,” resembled more of a mosque than a movie theatre mainly because we were holding content so as not to get scooped.

So, despite my initial grumblings about the projet, I wrote about my encounter with one of the avatars in the “Plural Living, God Willing” tent. It reads like a conversation, and if you continue reading on the “Faces of Faith” page, be sure to turn on the virtual soundtrack:

After the panel discussion and a little celebration on the dance floor, I retreated to the “Plural Living, God Willing” tent for a little alone time. I wanted to see if any participants were milling about ripe with questions about Islam and polygamy. Instead, I found Germi Runo in front of the tent pointing a long gun at me. It instantly turned into a sword, which swooped towards ClayW Winkler’s head, shaped like a fox.

“PB: what are you doing there?
PB: what is that gun?”…

read the rest of the story here.

Pastor Drew Phoenix is the first openly practicing transsexual minister within the United Methodist Church (UMC). Through my Carnegie-Knight Fellowship I had this summer, I traveled to Baltimore, Maryland to see how the recently self-outted minister interacted with his parishioners. See for yourself, in this slideshow I produced for NPR’s Bryant Park Project.

When the UMC’s Judicial Council met to decide his fate within the denomination, I worked with NPR’s Bryant Park Project producers to post a story on their blog. Check out the discussion it generated.

At the beginning of October, I teamed up with independent photographer Neil Osborne to produce “Generations,” at the Eddie Adams workshop this year. The 2-minute photo-slideshow profiles a fifth-generation dairy farm in upstate New York.

I was honored to have been invited to the workshop as a multimedia producer by Brian Storm of Media Storm. Along with some of his producers and several other talented multimedia extraordinaires, we created 10 espresso-like slideshow packages in 48 hours.