The New York Times Presents Our "Living City" Series
"Living City" Becomes First Project from NewsDox, the New Video Journalism Arm of Blue Chalk Media
Today, we’re proud to share the first of six films exploring the state of New York City infrastructure produced by NewsDox, the new video journalism division of Blue Chalk Media.
“We’re excited and grateful for the opportunity to inaugurate a new dimension of Blue Chalk with such a stunning look at the engineering behind the systems that New Yorkers rely on and that make the city liveable day by day,” said Blue Chalk CEO and founder Greg Moyer.
“Living City: A Tale of Two Bridges” compares the decision to replace the 60-year-old Tappan Zee Bridge connecting Westchester and Rockland counties across the Hudson River with the decision to renovate the iconic Brooklyn Bridge that is more than twice that age. The film will accompany an installment of The New York Times series, “A 21st-Century Span,” reported by metropolitan reporter Joseph Berger.
For the next five weeks, Living City films will be released on Thursdays or Fridays at NYTimes.com. Subsequent films in the series look at a range of major New York city and state infrastructure projects including the construction of the Second Avenue subway, repair of the aqueducts that carry drinking water to the city from its watershed, a pilot program for the recycling of organic waste, the role of steam as a source of greener energy, and finally, the impact of Superstorm Sandy on New York power and transportation systems two years after the storm made landfall.
The films are the first major initiative to come from a new unit of Blue Chalk designed to report and produce visual journalism in association with news organizations and knowledge brands. The Living City series was produced as a collaboration with The New York Times video department and the paper’s metro desk.
Series producer for Living City is Melanie Burford, a founding member of Prime Collective, adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and part of the team of Dallas Morning News photographers who received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography for coverage of Hurricane Katrina. A dedicated team including Burford and associate producers Gabriela Arp, Luke Versalko, and Eleonore Hamelin reported the stories. The primary camera work came from Bob Sacha, a noted New York-based documentary cameraman, Tow Professor for Visual Journalism at City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, and adjunct professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
“Going forward, our NewsDox unit will produce visually compelling stories that provide sophisticated news consumers a fresh and engaging way to see and understand their world,” said Moyer.