In 2006, 20 UNC and Chilean students spent 10 days in Robinson Crusoe Island, off the coast of Chile, to document its land, culture, and people for their award-winning multimedia project, Chasing Crusoe. Four years later, they learned that a recent tsunami caused by the Chilean earthquake devastated the small island and its people. By leveraging their multimedia storytelling skills, the former students quickly acted, in what has become a full-fledged grassroots humanitarian campaign.
II Spanish editor Andrea Ballocchi is Chilean, and she recently underwent the traumatic experience of frantically trying to contact her loved ones in the minutes and hours after the earthquake in Santiago. She wanted to provide her personal account here to detail the vital role that social media played in enabling her to quickly learn about the extent of the damage and connect with her family. Her first-hand perspective proves the importance of not only social media, but also of citizen journalists in providing the breaking information that we’ve traditionally gotten from news websites.
I am happy to announce that II posts are now being manually translated into Spanish. This is an exciting time for II since visitors from Spain, Mexico, Argentina and Chile make up a large proportion of our international visitors. Visitors can now switch back and forth between English and Spanish versions of II posts, and comment in either language. University of Miami graduate student Andrea Ballocchi is now serving as II’s Spanish editor, and will monitor all Spanish conversation on the site. Please join me in welcoming her as II truly goes global.
Throughout the past five years, I have seen some pretty incredible multimedia produced by people I have met along the way. These talented people from my school, internships and jobs have pushed me to work harder. Although not a comprehensive selection, here is my list of top-eight audio slide shows from this group. Thanks for the inspiration friends!