#neediest cases

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By BY ELISHA BROWN, SARA ARIDI, MARIA GONCHAROVA AND REMY TUMIN from Neediest Cases in the New York Times-https://ift.tt/2WZO31m Facing challenges wrought by the pandemic, The Fund’s beneficiaries brought help to people and communities. 10 Stories of Support in a Year of Obstacles New York Times

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By BY CHARLEY LOCKE from Neediest Cases in the New York Times-https://ift.tt/3aVwB6r Special Delivery: Thousands of Books New York Times

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Anatoliy Krongauz has two patents and eight inventions registered in Russia.

From a plastic bag, Mr. Krongauz, 80, pulled out black-and-white photographs of the projects, including a submarine transformer and an apparatus to destroy external tumors through a radiation process. One by one, he tossed records of his accomplishments onto a table at his home in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.

He started describing the scientific process of his medical apparatus in English, pointed to a picture, looked at his interpreter and returned to Russian.

Russia acknowledged much of Mr. Krongauz’s work in 1993, a year before he emigrated to the United States. By that time, Mr. Krongauz, a Holocaust survivor, had built his career amid anti-Semitism in Russia. He had met his wife and helped raise their family there. But at age 57, Mr. Krongauz was among those departing after Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s government eased emigration restrictions in the late 1980s.

“Do you think your nationality comes from your blood?” he asked, pointing to the veins in his arm. “Or where you live now?”

I shot this portrait of Anatoliy Krongauz as a part of campaign for The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, which provides assistance to those who are in immediate need of help here in new York city. It runs from October 15th 2017 to January 12, 2108 - please consider donating to help our struggling fellow New Yorkers -

https://www.nytimes.com/column/neediest-cases

Text by Emily Palmer

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The two sisters took over the restaurant and store in the early 1970s. At the time, you could order a ham sandwich for “a dollar and change,” Ozella Finlay, the older sibling, recalled. Most of the people who passed through the restaurant, Pat’s Luncheonette, at Utica Avenue and Dean Street in Brooklyn, worked nearby. Ms. Finlay and her sister, Ernestine Montgomery, managed everything from cooking and serving to stocking shelves. Working seven days a week, they opened at 7 a.m., in time for customers to pick up the morning newspaper, and closed at 10 p.m., serving short orders all day and selling household supplies to local residents. “It was mostly my idea,” Ms. Finlay said of buying the business in the Weeksville neighborhood with her sister, two years her junior. But “we always compromised and shared the responsibility.” The sisters got out of the business after eight years, and Ms. Finlay has not returned to the block since. Many of the homes once surrounding the area have been torn down, and she prefers remembering the luncheonette as it looked then. “I wouldn’t know the place now,” she said. At 97, Ms. Finlay describes memories in staccato, telling a parsed story in clipped sentences. Sitting cross-legged at a table in her living room this fall, with a green cane hooked on her chair, she did not wax sentimental about the past. I shot this portrait of Ozella Finlay as a part of campaign for The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, which provides assistance to those who are in immediate need of help here in new York city. It runs from October 15th 2017 to January 12, 2108 - please consider donating to help our struggling fellow New Yorkers - https://www.nytimes.com/column/neediest-cases

Thank you the New York Times and Cecilia Bohan for allowing me to be a part of the campaign, text by Emily Palmer

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Q&A: Video Journalist, Jane Teeling

JANE TEELING is a video journalist and producer working in New York City. Earlier this year I clicked on a tweet linking to a video she made for the Neediest Cases series in The New York Times. I was immediately drawn in and got in touch. Her work has also appeared in Christian Science Monitor, Newsweek and GlobalPost.

When we spoke, she talked of her reporting experiences in Lebanon, the challenges of shooting with limited equipment and sensitivities around the term “fixer.”

Jane has won multiple awards, including first place for the Society of Professional Journalists Region 1 Mark of Excellence Awards in the category of Online News Reporting and the Online In-Depth Reporting for “The Doctor Drain,” a multimedia group project about New York’s looming primary care crisis. She also won the Dennis Duggan Award from the Society of Silurians. Jane has a Master’s degree from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. You can see more of her work at janeteeling.com and follow her at @JaneTee.

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ReportHers: What was the goal of your trip to Lebanon and how successful were you? Jane Teeling: I went to Lebanon this past summer with my colleague who was also a CUNY graduate and a Fulbright scholar from Lebanon, Raed Rafei. We were looking at the conflict that was happening in Syria and how it was playing out in Lebanon. We thought, let's go over there and see what kind of stories we can pull, specifically in video, that humanize this political quagmire that Lebanon has found itself in because of the chaos next door. That was our goal. We were in Beirut but we also spent a lot of time in Tripoli. We did that because Tripoli is known as kind of a barometer of political tensions in Lebanon. It has a really strong Sunni population, it's close to Syria and it tends to be affected by what's happening across the border. And we definitely saw that while we were there. Some of the neighborhood street fighting, which has roots in historical grievances, was refreshed with everything that was happening next door. Lebanon, in general, is a really interesting proxy for tensions in the region and Tripoli specifically, which was Raed’s home city. It really showed us how that was playing out, in terms of conflicts between different groups. RH: How did you get to know about what's going on in the region before you went? JT: I've always been interested in Lebanon's role in Middle Eastern politics because it's such a tiny country but it's so heavily impacted by what happens around it. I read some books, Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem and a couple other key political analyses of the region. But also I was friends with and lived with Raed. So we were really close and he would tell me a lot about what was going on at home and his insight was invaluable because it was wasn't a Westerner looking in trying to figure things out. He grew up in Tripoli. He remembers that violence. Having that knowledge-sharing happening not only at school but also in our friendship and in our home was really invaluable. And then when I went over there, I loved reporting there because people were so open to talking about conflicts in the country, many of which had affected them personally and you would think would have caused them to hold grudges and not want to talk about the past, but I could get a stellar political rundown from the guy selling fruit next door. People were really open to talking about things and I got a surprising amount of unbiased analysis as well. I didn't talk to everyone in the street but I felt like people were so tired of the violence that had been affecting them back since Lebanon’s civil war, they were more inclined to have a big-picture analysis of things rather than being too caught up in their ideologies. Granted, there were people who were extremely sectarian also, pledge their allegiance to Sunni culture or Hezbollah, but the education I received from the man-on-the-street interviews was invaluable. Every day I was like, Wait a minute, I don't understand this and someone would explain it to me. So I learned a lot on the ground.

I would get a stellar political rundown from the guy selling fruit.

RH: How did you prepare before you went? JT: I would just keep a daily reading list and just sort of jumped in, following all the major events and some of the reports coming out of the UN. I had to really keep track of those reports, as well as news stories. And in terms of selling our stories, Raed and I made a very lengthy list of possible outlets for publication. We just fired off general emails to lots of people and said, Hey, this is who we are, this is the equipment we have, this is what we do, these are the stories we are looking for. A lot of editors were like, Get in touch when you have something. But we had introduced ourselves, so we felt like we had done some of our due diligence before we went over. By the time we got over there we had editors that we were in touch with. RH: Tell me about Stories Near and Far and the role that played in pitching. JT: We started that as a way to share with friends and family–and also editors–things that we were discovering in the reporting process as we were building the stories for publication. I think we probably could've kept up with it a little bit better but it was kind of a good way to enjoy a little bit of the first person experience in a semi-professional platform. We could put ourselves in the story a little bit, talk about what we were seeing. It also gave people a sense of what we were doing and I hope that some editors would get a feel for us as reporters and also as storytellers and then we could also use it as a promotion platform. RH: In your career, what was it like to transition from print to video? JT: I've always been interested in photography and documentaries and visual storytelling but I never really thought that I had the bandwidth to transition. So when I was at CUNY, I took Bob Sacha's video storytelling class and I found that a lot of the tenants of visual storytelling made me a better journalist. In some ways it was tricky. You know, you have to know your camera and you have to understand ways to shoot sequences, compressing action over time. There was a technical learning curve for sure. Also, the things you have to capture in video: It seems to me that it's so less forgiving because you are there and you need to capture what's in front of you and you don't get a second chance a lot of times. You really have to know your story before you dive in and start fire-hosing try and get as much footage as possible. If you've thought about your story and the conflict and the characters and the scenes, then I think you have a better video at the end. The way that transitioned to writing for me was that it really made me think a lot more about the process. It kind of works backwards. I had to learn all the technical skills to do video, but in the end it made me a better writer.

RH: Tell me about making non-narrated videos for The New York Times. JT: I met with Shayla Harris, who was a former professor of mine at CUNY, after Lebanon. I just wanted to check in and say hello and see what opportunities were coming up at the Times. She said to me that she had a series in mind for me. It’s a temporary series about the Neediest Cases Fund in The New York Times, something that the company has funded for number of years. They want to do more video profiles of the recipients. She suggested it to me, if I'm recalling it right, because I really do like intimate human stories. I'd worked on one with a colleague of mine for her class. Maybe that stuck in her head that that's the kind of work I like to do. So I didn't exactly pitch them as much as I did check in with people I knew to see what opportunities were available. Shayla is someone I greatly admire for the work that she's done for the Times. I'm really lucky and really honored that she said, Hey, I have you in mind for this series. RH: When did you start doing video? JT: I took a broadcast class at CUNY. I interned at GlobalPost and did a little bit of video at the end of the internship. Working with Solana Pyne at GlobalPost was really the start of me doing video and that internship was invaluable.

RH: But video was not something that you were doing for a while? JT: Oh no. Not at all. RH: The technical aspects are so challenging as I’m learning video. For some reason, my brain refuses to hold a shot for more than a second. What was the biggest challenge for you when learning video? JT: The biggest challenge was probably thinking about scenes in a storytelling manner. How to show what I wanted my story to say about people. Then actually doing that in a sequence and putting together a series of shots that compressed time. And not only a series like the traditional, BBC five-shot sequence but shots where each of them were pretty. You want to go for something that's visually appealing, too. I would say that that was the hardest part. Literally taking the concept, the technical thing, and being disciplined. And believe me, I definitely screwed up a lot and shot a lot of footage that I never used. But you learn those hard lessons. I worked on a video story about a pit bull trainer. She wanted to be filmed and she was okay with having me follow her around so I got to experiment a lot. That time to be flexible and make mistakes and experiment in the editing suite was really valuable. You need to get out all the kinks and learn to hold your shots and think, Hey, natural sound is really key and I got to think about what scenes I'm grabbing and how I'm going to make that person come to life in b-roll, which sometimes is really boring but can be magic if you do it right.

I definitely screwed up a lot and shot a lot of footage that I never used. You learn those hard lessons.

RH: What setup do you use if you're out on your own? JT: I use a Canon 5D. I have a 24-105 lens, which I like because it's flexible in terms of what I can shoot, but the aperture isn't quite ideal so I also have a 50mm lens that is a 1.4. That has a really low depth of field, which I like to use for interviews. I think it handles light really nicely. I have a zoom H4N. I have a Rode shotgun mic and I always end up borrowing a lavalier mic. I need to buy my own. I don't have any lights. I use natural light a lot. There’s a million things I'd love to buy but I got to piece it together slowly but carefully. Oh, and I have a monopod, which I love. It forces you to keep moving. Well, it encourages you to keep moving. RH: Is it the one that has the tiny legs at the bottom? JT: Yeah, it's got little tiny legs. I actually learned to use that shooting interviews. It's funny the sort of the things you make do with. Yea, a tripod would be great, but I've learned to hold the monopod still enough and peek around the side so that I'm interviewing someone so that they're not looking into the camera. You end up doing this weird ritual where nothing is ever perfect but you survive. RH: That's really the essence of journalism, isn't it? JT: Yea, especially when you have a lot of equipment. You find a workaround immediately. You can't get upset. RH: Is there skill or set of skills that have been indispensable for you? JT: I would say video skills, not only for the doors it's opened, really encouraging me to be more visual and creative with my stories, but also because it has forced me to really operate two sides of my brain at once. It was hard at first but it's really exhilarating to really be focused on what's happening technically. When you're a one-man band and you're interviewing someone, especially if you're interviewing someone for The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, which a lot of the stories are heartwarming and sometimes a little bit tragic or you're interviewing someone who lives in a refugee camp or a student from Syria who is trying to get by in Lebanon, or whatever the case, you still have to be a human being. What I like about video is that it's forced me to operate in dual modes. Being technical and being present in the sense that I'm in control of all this data that I'm taking in. But also making eye contact and showing someone that I empathize with them. It's really challenging. Sometimes I do self-deprecating laughs to make them feel more comfortable as I am thinking through the technical things. You always have to be present with someone and let them know that you really are listening to them, but at the same time you also have to think, How my going to make this into a story later. And I like that challenge. RH: What languages do you speak? JT: I speak a good high school French. I speak a couple words of Arabic now but they're mostly fun words like Let’s go or Congratulations. RH: So was Raed the fixer in Lebanon? JT: You know, that's a good question. He translated in a lot of instances. But we would work together to find sources and people and to contact editors, so I hate to use the word fixer for him because we were equals. I look up to him and learned a lot from him while we were working together. RH: I meant that you didn't have to hire a fixer or a translator because you were partnering with someone who had those language skills. JT: Exactly. But it's a good question. It's an interesting word that I've pondered. I worked in Turkey as well and I hired a fixer there and it was a completely different experience. Working side-by-side with someone and sharing story ideas and talking to contacts is a whole different level. It's also an interesting comment on international reporting and how little, I don't want to say how little credit fixers get, but we wouldn't have any stories coming out written by foreign reporters overseas if we didn't have fixers. It's an interesting relationship there. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

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