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.

This flash web feature was my masters thesis at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Through a series of photo-slideshows and interactive graphics, “Remnants of War” shows the increase in use of landmines in Colombia and how it largely affects the country’s innocent, rural, poor civilians.

I think the project took a few years off my life. Not only because I listened to stories of murder and misery, but because I was learning Flash as I went along. Throw in reporting, color correcting, and writing, and you have very little sleep for 4 months. But I finished. And this is the multimedia piece I’m most proud of. Spend some time with it. Human Rights Watch launched just the slideshows with their report on use of Colombian Landmines in July 2007.

Check out the spanish version.

Here’s a video I produced when I was at Journalism School. It’s a 2-minute feature I shot, reported and narrated as part of our newscast, which I also co-anchored. If you get bored of watching me and Larry Santana talk, you can scroll through to the middle of the newscast.

The piece is about Wendy-O-Matik, a writer and “radical love” activist in Berkeley. By profiling the polyamory workshops she gives in the San Francisco Bay area, it explores whether “being open” is a sexual orientation.

Before I embarked on months of Flash programming for my masters project on Colombian Landmine victims, I thought I would practice using the program with a topic a lighter topic. For a while, I was playing with the idea of doing my thesis on “polyamorous” people in the San Francisco Bay area, or people who take non-monagamy as a lifestyle and/or sexual orientation. For my research, I found profiled several different species, from the Dungfly to the Bonobo, about their non-monogamous tendencies. Apparently, being “sexually open” isn’t as unusual as you may think. Please, forgive the utter ridiculousness of this project. I promise, it was just for Flash practice.