ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the blog created by the Washington Post in the summer of 2009, documenting the stories created by a video journalist and the Mexico bureau chief: “Mexico at War: Journey along the Border with Travis Fox and William Booth,” (https://voices.washingtonpost.com/mexico/" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://voices.washingtonpost.com/mexico/). 8 They engaged in the kind of cutting-edge journalism that’ll continue to shift and change in the coming years. Using current technology—the blog—as a framework for journalism containing text, pictures, and video, they at the same time created a space for their audience to add their opinions and stories to the work presented by the reporters. In addition, Fox and Booth tweeted their stories. “The philosophy on this project and Hard Times [the road trip about the state of the economy produced in November 2008],” Fox tells me in an interview in Mexicali, “is that it’s kind of wide, but not necessarily deep, and so it’s a matter of building an audience as well and interacting with the audience in real time.” 9 The web is still in its infancy and experimentation is the name of the game. “So it’s just a different way of using the medium,” Fox muses.
I’ve been at it for ten years, but the medium is still young, and we’re still experimenting, so, I think the differences that you see is experimentation. Seeing what works, and seeing what doesn’t work, and seeing how to really capture the viewers and involve them in what we’re doing.
