Dipping into VR Journalism, Part 5, Educators

Bob Sacha

Bob Sacha, who has long been a guru of what's new in video, and how to delve into it, has done a great job on Medium documenting his journey as an educator, teaching himself as he teaches students at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. In this other Medium post, he interviews an independent VR journalist.



Robert Hernandez

A program that keeps popping up concerning VR journalism is USC Annenberg, and several of its professors, including Robert Hernandez, who has a Tumblr on VR journalism. Here's his VR tip sheet. Here's a video promoting one of his VR classes below.



A Joint Investigation

A joint investigative VR project with his students and Pro Publica and the Texas Tribune got lots of conference and even media attention. Below some of the work for this project on Houston being at risk of extreme Hurricane damage.



Students Filming a March in VR

Here's a women's march the USC school posted on their JOVRNALISM YouTube site.



Stanford's Peninsula Press

The Stanford student journalist website now has its 360 immersive storytelling section, which includes videos like the one below. Here a student explains the audio part of her VR project. Here's an article about a VR storytelling bootcamp at Stanford, and another one about the same immersive journalism training. They also came up with a Medium article on dos and dont's.



Luka Starmer and Wolf Pack What VR at UNR

As part of his grad studies, Luka Starmer , started a VR student web video show at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University Nevada, Reno, called Wolf Pack What VR. In the video below, interviewing the New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet, he used innovative sound design and also an "infinite white background" to amazing effect. The project got undergrads to participate in conceptualizing and producing VR news content.



Nonny de la Pena

The so-called "godmother of VR", Nonny de la Pena, is also now a senior research fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. She's popular on the Ted evangelical circuits as below in Berlin.



Kevin Tsukii

Coming from the USC and Emblematic families, Kevin Tsukii also has primers and best practices for slightly more advanced gear such as here. Below a video stitching program he promotes.



Dan Pacheco

Dan Pacheco at Syracuse University teaches a Virtual Reality Storytelling class. He promotes the Harvest of Change report he worked on, an "explanatory journalism project" using 360-video about an Iowa farm family.



Sarah Hill, StoryUp, Google News Lab/ the Knight Foundation and Journalism 360

Read all about this initiative spearheaded by Sarah Hill from StoryUp, which collaborates with CBS, here. This Medium page for Journalism 360 compilates a lot of the cheerleaders and innovators mentioned in this posting.

Sue Ding

On the research side, Sue Ding at the MIT Open Documentary LAB, looks into the past, present and future of VR storytelling.

International Center for Journalists

Here's a really good tipsheet on getting started with basic equipment and start to finish on a 360 project.

More Primers on VR Storytelling

There's the Google Group on VR journalism which has a plethora of useful guides.

Here's the Huffington Post own primer on the basics of VR storytelling with examples.

The Perspectives VR Group has an interesting and very basic article (screengrab below), on what might work and what might not work when news organizations go 360.

Here's another article saying VR isn't quite there yet.