MediaStorm 2013 Workshop Dates Announced

We are excited to be entering into our sixth training year at MediaStorm. Each year our workshops attract leading industry professionals looking to advance their multimedia and storytelling skills. We've now had more than 100 participants come through our professional workshops and we continue to be humbled by how much they take away from the experience. John Temple, now managing editor at the Washington Post, told us that our Methodology Workshop gave him, "time to stop and step into a different way of seeing journalism." He said, "I came away inspired by what's possible if we commit to a different way of thinking about stories." After taking our Storytelling Workshop, Simon Schorno, head of media relations for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in North America, had the following to say, "The passion of the entire MediaStorm crew for documentary storytelling, their professionalism, their willingness to share what they know…

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Aftermath Project 2013 Grant Cycle Opens

The Aftermath Project 2013 grant cycle is now open. The project will be awarding one $20,000 grant for 2013 and naming four finalists. The work of the grant winner and finalists will be published in “War is Only Half the Story, Vol Seven.” Apply for this years grant at http://www.theaftermathproject.org/. Application deadline November 5, 2012. The Aftermath Project is a non-profit organization committed to telling the other half of the story of conflict — the story of what it takes for individuals to learn to live again, to rebuild destroyed lives and homes, to restore civil societies, to address the lingering wounds of war while struggling to create new avenues for peace. Grant proposals should reflect an understanding of this mission and may relate to the aftermath of numerous kinds of conflict, not just international wars. The project holds a yearly grant competition open to working photographers worldwide covering the aftermath of…

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Apple’s Billion Dollar Storytelling

Apple's victory over Samsung in a recent smartphone patent brawl netted the company over a billion dollars in damages and, more importantly for Apple, might have strategically slowed the rise of the Korean tech juggernaught that today provides phones to 26 percent of all U.S. mobile subcribers according to comScore. But what clinched Apple the win, one of the largest patent awards ever on record? Storytelling, according to juror interviews by the Wall Street Journal. For Samsung, the story it had to get across was that Apple's patents weren't as crucially innovative as Apple claimed them to be, and Apple had to tell the story of a Samsung copycat. "The Apple lawyers were better at presenting their case," juror Manuel Ilagan said to the Journal. Of particular strength was a visual that showed Samsung phones before and after the iPhone came out. The Journal quotes presiding juror Velvin Hogan to say that it seemed…

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