OUT OF EDEN WALK

When Caitlin Puffenberger set out on her first homework assignment in downtown Richmond, Virginia, she didn’t know exactly what she was looking for. In fact, that was the point.

“Our assignment was simple: Take a walk and find something interesting,” she recalls. “Then find something else, and something else, and so on. You really had to look because at first everything was so ordinary—things you’d seen a hundred times but never really noticed. Walking changed that. Later each of us had to draw a detailed map of our walk, make photographs of everything that caught our eye, and interview someone we met along the way. But at first we had no idea what, if anything, we would find.”

It was spring of 2014, and Puffenberger, then a senior at Virginia Commonwealth University, was taking “Slow Journalism in a Fast World,” the university course I had designed around the methodology and literary journalism of my friend and former National Geographic colleague Paul Salopek. Education was an important part of the Walk’s mission, and Paul had partnered with Project Zero at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to share the project with thousands of schoolchildren in the U.S. and around the world. But until that spring, the Walk wasn’t taught on college campuses.

Like Paul’s slow walk, my course was designed to explore the creative frontiers of slow journalism, a movement away from the super-fast, superficial coverage that dominates modern news media, and toward a more in-depth, deliberate, mindful approach to narrative journalism using the very latest tools of digital technology.

And by assigning Caitlin and her dozen or so classmates to record the telling details along a city street, I hoped to slow their reporting metabolism, engage their senses and curiosity, and help them to become alert to the stories all around them. Their other homework—reading Paul’s dispatches, which we analyzed and discussed—gave students a master class in how to spin those storytelling threads into gold.

“Paul’s work was an inspiration to us, and provided a kind of textbook for what slow journalism looks like,” Caitlin says. “At the same time, we were practicing those observational skills and learning to use them in our reporting.”

Students later divided into storytelling teams that were assigned to work on larger and more complex reporting projects. These covered themes and subcultures in the city—from street artists to the homeless, from microbrews to Confederate relics.

Building on that curriculum at the University of Richmond, I’ve been able to bring together journalism students like Caitlin with those majoring in fields such as geography, history, religion, and environmental science—all subjects that appear regularly in Paul’s dispatches. With support from the university, I’ve also encouraged in-depth student reporting on the diverse neighborhoods of Richmond, a genteel southern city with a history of racial division and one of the nation’s highest levels of income inequality.

“It’s a real eye-opener for many of our students to meet and interview people whose lives are nothing like theirs,” says Robert Hodierne, who chairs the journalism department. “This course fits perfectly with the goal of our department and the university as a whole in getting our students engaged in the community around us.”

This past semester, students reported from inner-city neighborhoods struggling with issues such as immigration, gentrification, and the lack of services (banking, food stores, and public transportation), walking their way through some of the poorest parts of the city. Their student reporting, collected on the website Walking Richmond, tells the stories of these neighborhoods in text, photographs, multimedia, and interactive maps.

One team produced a map series to illustrate the concept of urban “food deserts;” other students, covering a neighborhood of Latino immigrants, translated their dispatches into Spanish so that members of that community, isolated and fearing deportation, could read what was written about them.

“Journalism, geography—I think all majors can learn from the Walk,” says Kevin Johnson, a junior from Kensington, Maryland who teamed with a geography major and another journalist to cover Richmond’s Highland Park. “Paul inspired us to take that extra step. For him it might mean climbing a mountain. But for us, on this project, it meant walking up to someone who’s sitting on their front porch, and being open enough to experience their lives first-hand. Being there is an invaluable resource—and to me that’s the lesson of Paul’s entire experience.”

Our success with slow journalism in Richmond has begun to generate interest elsewhere. My colleague Jeff South, an associate professor of journalism at Virginia Commonwealth University, and I co-authored a 7,500-word monograph on slow journalism and my Out of Eden Walk curriculum that was seen by educators around the world in a British scholarly journal, Digital Journalism. He and I have spoken to conventions of both university educators and professional journalists, and we’ve seen how Paul’s Walk—and digital tools such as StoryMapJS—can inspire others to find stories in their own backyards.

For the past several years I’ve also partnered with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to teach hands-on workshops for educators at universities around the United States. Delivering practical tips along with my curriculum, I’ve taught the Out of Eden Walk to hundreds of educators at host institutions including Syracuse, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and San Diego State. Many of those teachers later introduced Paul’s work into their classes and found, as I have, that students are both awed by the magnitude of Paul’s undertaking and inspired by his writing.

“Paul’s Walk is a terrific resource for anyone seeking to teach the fundamentals of good journalism,” says Ann Peters, director of the Pulitzer Center’s Campus Consortium network. “These Walk on Campus workshops help faculty get a good handle on the vast amount of information available through Paul’s reporting and spark ideas on how to incorporate the material into courses.”

Justin Catanoso, director of journalism at Wake Forest, attended the first Walk on Campus workshop in Washington, D.C. Weeks later, leading a trip abroad, he assigned his student reporters to slow-walk the streets of Rome.

Anne Donahue of Boston University had her students practice slow journalism in the far-flung precincts of that city every week, then post their in-depth reporting to the university’s web-based news service.

And Melissa Chessher, chair of the Magazine Department at Syracuse, hosted a Walk on Campus workshop, then sent her Multimedia Projects class onto city streets to do a combination of data collection and shoe-leather reporting: “A team of designers and a team of content creators (divided into 10 teams of two students) spent the semester exploring 10 blocks of Syracuse, N.Y., securing census data, exploring characters, and applying multimedia tools across a range of story types that remained consistent for each block and that forced each team to invest much time with their block.”

So far these Pulitzer Center/Out of Eden workshops have reached professors and students at a wide range of other institutions, including George Washington, American University, Washington University, Southern Illinois, Elon, Northwestern, William & Mary, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and San Diego State. For more information on my curriculum or to host a workshop, contact me at don@donbelt.org.

Like Paul, the Walk on Campus is going slow, one step at a time. But for many of us, including students like Caitlin and Kevin, that sounds about right.

During his 25 years as a National Geographic writer and senior editor, Don Belt authored more than two dozen feature stories for the magazine. He now teaches journalism at the University of Richmond. He’s on Twitter @dbelt50.