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POV and The New York Times Close Out Embedded Mediamaker Partnership with Final Project on Ruby Bridges

June 29, 2017 — New York, N.Y. — POV’s and The New York Times embedded mediamaker project reached its final triumphant milestone this week as the piece “6 Years and Desegregating a School” by Bayeté Ross Smith and Logan Jaffe published in the Times on today. Beginning in 2016, POV partnered with The New York Times on the project, in which three filmmakers fluent in digital media spent several months working at The Times, creating interactive video projects about race and ethnicity. The work was co-produced by senior editorial staff at POV and The Times' video and national desks and connected to The Times' Race/Related newsletter. The mutual goal was to produce bold, challenging projects about race that neither The Times nor POV would create on their own, and, for POV, to explore new avenues of digital distribution. About the Mediamakers:

Bayeté Ross Smith (20-week embed, beginning Aug. 22, 2016) is a photographer, multimedia artist and filmmaker from Harlem, N.Y. He began his career as a photojournalist with Knight Ridder. Ross Smith has exhibited his work internationally with institutions such as the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Brooklyn Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, the Schomburg Center, the Unseen Photo Festival (Amsterdam), Goethe-Institut (Ghana) and Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Poland). His collaborative projects "Along The Way" and "Question Bridge: Black Males" were showcased at the Sundance Film Festival among other festivals. His accolades include an International Center of Photography Infinity Award for New Media. Ross Smith is a faculty member at the International Center of Photography and New York University and associate program director of the nonprofit Kings Against Violence Initiative. Follow Bayeté Ross Smith on Twitter and Instagram @BayeteKenan.

Logan Jaffe was the multimedia producer of WBEZ's Curious City, a news-gathering experiment that answers listeners' questions about the Chicago region. She is the producer of Battle Flag, an interactive documentary about the Confederate flag's place in America, which was featured in The Atlantic, The Guardian and The Washington Post. Following her time as a mediamaker, Logan joined The Times as a producer/journalist on their 360 video team. Follow Logan Jaffe on Twitter @loganjaffe.

Saleem Reshamwala is a video producer based in Durham, N.C., whose work has focused on culture, race and music. Reshamwala has created work for LinkedIn, Soccer.com and PBS Digital Studios, for which he filmed rappers and beatmakers in Senegal, Ethiopia, Fiji, Panama and the Democratic Republic of Congo (for the web series "Beat Making Lab"). He also had "an incredibly weird" two-year stint as an art assistant at Seventeen Magazine. Reshamwala has studied, worked or hung out in 50 countries and is fluent in English, Japanese and Final Cut. He has degrees in journalism and philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Follow Saleem Reshamwala on Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat @kidethnic.

About the projects Confronting Racist Objects: A Painful Past Still Present Racist objects remain pervasive in America today – so how can we use them to face our past? POV embedded mediamaker Logan Jaffe, working in collaboration with The New York Times' Race/Related team, received hundreds of stories from everyday Americans about reconciling, reclaiming and reinterpreting racist objects. Watch video and read some of their stories. Exit Poll Oversimplification This election year has often felt like one enormous swarm of poll numbers, vote forecasts and nonstop statistical analysis. All this number crunching led POV Mediamaker Saleem Reshamwala and The New York Times' Giovanni Russonello to wonder what might be missed when we try to describe entire groups as being uniformly for or against a presidential candidate. Who, Me? Biased? Our subconscious brain makes all sort of quick – and not always fair – decisions about everything, including race. Saleem Reshamwala, one of POV's mediamakers embedded at The New York Times, looks at research into implicit bias and tangible ways we can improve. Hyphen Nation The filmmaker and artist Bayeté Ross Smith asked nine different Americans of varied backgrounds questions about when they have felt most and least American. You can see their answers in Hyphen-Nation, a video, art and interactive project – and you can also participate. #HereIsMyAmerica revisited Earlier this year Bayeté Ross Smith, one of POV's mediamakers working on a collaboration with the New York Times' Race/Related team, launched a project to collect images of a diverse America. Hundreds of people contributed vibrant photos and stories about their lives, and a selection of those have now been published at The Times. #AwkwardRaceQuestions: For the past few months, three POV mediamakers have been embedded at The New York Times working on projects about race and ethnicity. Along the way, they asked each other a bunch of awkward questions about race and answered those questions on Instagram. Dive into the entire conversation. Daily 360: Firsthand Account: The Assassination of Malcolm X The civil rights leader Malcolm X was killed Feb. 21, 1965, at a rally in New York City. In this project by Bayeté Ross Smith, we hear from a witness, A. Peter Bailey, and visit the site of the assassination — in the past, present, and in 360 video.

* * * * Produced by American Documentary, Inc., POV is public television’s premier showcase for nonfiction films. Since 1988, POV has been the home for the world’s boldest contemporary

filmmakers, celebrating intriguing personal stories that spark conversation and inspire action. Always an innovator, POV discovers fresh new voices and creates interactive experiences that shine a light on social issues and elevate the art of storytelling. With our documentary broadcasts, original online programming and dynamic community engagement campaigns, we are committed to supporting films that capture the imagination and present diverse perspectives. POV films have won 36 Emmy® Awards, 19 George Foster Peabody Awards, 12 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, three Academy Awards®, the first-ever George Polk Documentary Film Award and the Prix Italia. The POV series has been honored with a Special News & Documentary Emmy Award for Excellence in Television Documentary Filmmaking, three IDA Awards for Best Curated Series and the National Association of Latino Independent Producers Award for Corporate Commitment to Diversity. Learn more at www.pbs.org/pov/. POV Community Engagement and Education (www.pbs.org/pov/engage/) POV’s Community Engagement and Education team works with educators, community organizations and PBS stations to present more than 650 free screenings every year. In addition, we distribute free discussion guides and standards-aligned lesson plans for each of our films. With our community partners, we inspire dialogue around the most important social issues of our time. POV Digital (www.pbs.org/pov/) Since 1994, POV Digital has driven new storytelling initiatives and interactive production for POV. The department created PBS’s first program website and its first web-based documentary (POV’s Borders) and has won major awards, including a Webby Award (and six nominations) and an Online News Association Award. POV Digital continues to explore the future of independent nonfiction media through its digital productions and the POV Hackathon lab, where media makers and technologists collaborate to reinvent storytelling forms. @povdocs on Twitter. American Documentary, Inc. (www.amdoc.org) American Documentary, Inc. (AmDoc) is a multimedia company dedicated to creating, identifying and presenting contemporary stories that express opinions and perspectives rarely featured in mainstream media outlets. AmDoc is a catalyst for public culture, developing collaborative strategic engagement activities around socially relevant content on television, online and in community settings. These activities are designed to trigger action, from dialogue and feedback to educational opportunities and community participation. Major funding for POV is provided by PBS, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Corporation for Public Broadcasting and National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funding comes from Nancy Blachman and David desJardins, Bertha Foundation, Wyncote Foundation, The Fledgling Fund, Marguerite Casey Foundation, Ettinger Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, and public television viewers. POV is presented by a consortium of public television stations, including KQED San Francisco, WGBH Boston and THIRTEEN in association with WNET.ORG.