OUTRIDERS VISUAL STORYTELLING

2021

OUTRIDERS VISUAL STORYTELLING

Country/area: Spain

Organisation: OUTRIDERS

Organisation size: Small

Cover letter:

Dear Mrs/Mr,

We are writing to nominate OUTRIDERS to the SIGMA AWARD 2021.

Outriders is a Poland-based non profit media organization that uses innovative tools to explain crucial topics. Our projects combine the foundations of traditional reporting with visually compelling designs.

We would like to highlight 5 projects that we published during 2020, where we used different tools and approaches, such as a comic, illustrations, Google Earth, Whatsapp as a reporting tool or a large database of global responses to the effects of COVID-19.

1) Favelas vs COVID-19: What the residents living on the periphery can teach us about strategies to combat the pandemic.

FORM – COMIC JOURNALISM

HIGHLIGHT – CROSS-BORDER & SOLUTION JOURNALISM
It is a multimedia comic about the grassroots initiatives that were launched by the residents of some favelas in São Paulo to face the problems caused or exacerbated by the pandemic. The idea arose after searching and analyzing over 1,000 responses to the effects of the pandemic with a cross-border team. We used a solution journalism approach. It was published in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish.

2) Rojava Diary.

FORM- MULTIMEDIA

HIGHLIGHT: USING WHATSAPP AS A REPORTING TOOL

Following the Turkish offensive, in October 2019, Outriders worked on a diary from the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, also known as Rojava, working together with a local journalist in the field and using WhatsApp as a reporting tool.

One of the novelties of this project is that we use WhatsApp to collect data on the field and reporting. We chose WhatsApp to facilitate the immediacy and speed when sending materials from anywhere. For instance, the reporter visited a road in the Turkish border, or a village or a prison, and he sent pictures, videos, interviews and observations using voice and text messages by WhatsApp on site.

3) RADAR

FORM – DATABASE

HIGHLIGHT: DATA JOURNALISM, SOLUTION JOURNALISM AND CROSS-BORDER

For three months, a cross-border team of journalists tracked positive responses to the effects of Covid-19, collecting more than 1,000 responses from around the world. The team of reporters were from Brazil, Botswana, Taiwan, Belarus and Spain. They collected responses to different direct or indirect effects of the pandemic including unemployment, shortage of health resources, abandonment of vulnerable populations. They were responses created by diverse initiators: individuals, NGO’s, communities, governments, companies. Measures include launching a radio show in several indigenous languages to inform of prevention measures, using sound cars with hip hop and lyrics about health in a Brazilian favela or Educational TV shows in Portugal or Rwanda to train childrens during the lockdow

4) Biopirates of the Indian Ocean

FORM: MULTIMEDIA

HIGHLIGHT: ILLUSTRATIONS AS A BOTANIC BOOK STYLE

This article, which resembles the antique botanical books, is a visual journey through the iconic cases of biopiracy in Sri lanka. Biopiracy is the name given to the practice of using and commercially exploiting the biological resources and indigenous knowledge of a country without permission or compensation.

5) Fleeing the Syrian war to war-torn Nagorno-Karabakh.

FORM- MULTIMEDIA

HIGHLIGHT: GOOGLE EARTH

It is a story of the family who drove the 1,600 km that separate Aleppo from Stepanakert in their black Kia to start from scratch. We used Google earth to draw the specific road and trip that this family drove to show the readers the long way of a migrant family who left their past, since we think when the media writes about how long or hard the trip of a migrant is it might be difficult to imagine it.

Thank you for the consideration,

Outriders team.

Description of portfolio:

1) COMIC – Favelas vs COVID-19: What the residents living on the periphery can teach us about strategies to combat the pandemic.

When we decided to write about the solidarity initiatives in some Brazilian favelas during the pandemic, we expected to respect three premises:

Firstly, we wanted to know further details about the initiatives of these favelas but without exposing their residents to the risk of contagion
secondly, media rarely write about the positive aspects of these neighbourhoods; we wanted to focus on the responses to difficulties rather than to show difficulties
and finally, we wanted to talk about the pandemic, but we knew that readers were overwhelmed with news about the pandemic so the format should be engaging.

A comic seemed an ideal tool to achieve our three requirements: first, illustrations allowed us just visiting some of the people involved without an excessive presence. Second, the comic was an ideal platform to give visibility to the interviewees as heroes instead of as victims and finally, it offered us an engaging format to attract the reader’s attention.

We believe that a comic is an ideal format to cover sensitive topics, not only during a pandemic but during a conflict or harmful event. On the one hand, it seems less intrusive when it comes to portraying the reality of people than photographing or making a video; on the other hand, it has an engaging component to attract attention to important topics.

2) Rojava Diary.

We used WhatsApp to create a multimedia crossborder story from a conflict zone.

3) RADAR

We found over 1,000 responses to the effects of COVID-19 created by diverse initiators: individuals, NGO’s, communities, governments, companies. Measures include launching a radio show in several indigenous languages to inform of prevention measures, using sound cars with hip hop and lyrics about health in a Brazilian favela or Educational TV shows in Portugal or Rwanda to train childrens during the lockdow

4) Biopirates of the Indian Ocean

It includes interviews with Mr Samantha Gunasekara, former Srilankan Deputy Director of Customs, who spent two decades trying to prevent the island’s resources and heritage from being looted; the visit to the Institute of Indigenous Medicine in Colombo, where the ancient manuscripts with formulas on palm leaves are stored or the interview to a five generations family of Ayurvedic practitioners behind the only Sri Lankan company that owns a patent of a product made from endemic plants in the island. The article also explores four successful cases fighting biopiracy around India, Peru, Ethiopia and Brazil.

5) Fleeing the Syrian war to war-torn Nagorno-Karabakh.

Google earth can be a fantastic tool to show give context to the stories. We used it to tell the journey of a family who drove the 1,600 km that separate Aleppo from Stepanakert in their black Kia to start from scratch.