Gabriel Dance, Feilding Cage, Joshua Davis and Nacho Corbella won Emmys at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards on Sept. 30. Dance and Cage, along with their team from the Guardian, were presented the Emmy in the New Approaches: Current News Coverage category, for their interactive piece, “NSA Files: Decoded.”
Davis, Corbella and their NPR team won in the New Approaches: Documentary category for their visual story, “Planet Money Makes a T-shirt.”
As the interactive editor of the Guardian, Dance said he found the public’s reaction to Edward Snowden’s leak of National Security Agency (NSA) documents compelling for an interactive article, featuring interviews, infographics and statistics.
“I worked with reporter Ewen MacAskill to put together the story that we wanted to tell, and the goal of ‘NSA: Decoded’ was to make the story the Guardian had been reporting over the past four or five months more easily relevant to our readers, which is to say to make it personal and direct and interesting,” Dance said. “Because what we continued to hear from people when we talked about the NSA story was that ‘Oh, I’m not doing anything wrong so this doesn’t have to do with me,’ and I considered that a really dangerous thing to say.”
Davis holds a similar sentiment regarding the pertinence of “Planet Money Makes a T-shirt,” a project that followed the inputs and processes involved in creating a T-shirt, that make it a global project. Davis created another Emmy-nominated piece called “100 Gallons” while at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and notes its impact on “Planet Money Makes a T-shirt.”
“I got hired to build a team and produce the project, so my process for that was similar to things I had done at UNC through ‘100 Gallons,’ where we just sort of involved people from a variety of skill sets to form a team and to tell a story,” Davis said.
The project sold T-shirts that can be scanned by a smartphone to see those who created the shirt and has raised over $590,000 on Kickstarter.
Susan King, dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said she hopes the recent success of its graduates will bring the school even more acclaim in the industry.
