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I've only just caught up with this New York Times series from last week by David Rohde, the reporter who was held for seven months by the Taliban last year but made an unlikely escape. It's a gripping tale on many levels, but I thought I'd highlight here the techniques employed by the newspaper to tell it. It's available both as a five-part interactive video series, in which he tells he story to the camera, and as a straight text piece, which he wrote.
For me, it's an excellent example of how new storytelling techniques don't always produce better results than old ones . In this case the video pieces suffer from a lack of compelling pictures to go with the story - while Rohde himself is not the greatest on-camera presence. And despite the fact that the NYT multimedia team has pulled out all the stops with a 3D reconstruction of the escape, I think the text piece remains the far more compelling and information-rich piece of journalism.
I too preferred the part of the text that I have read. It's a gripping read. I agree the video pieces perhaps lack pictures, and that Mr Rohde is not the most complelling of talkers.
But I found plenty of fascinating content in Rohde's video interviews, maybe because I have a high tolerance for such material.
For me, the main thing is that few people get to spend extended periods with the Taliban and return to tell us about it. (The other one I know of recently is Sean Langan.) It is valuable to listen to what Rohde has to say about the motivation of the Taliban fighters he lived with. The ignorance of young men who have had little education or access to accurate reporting, and who have never travelled is breathtaking but understandable. This isn't new information, but it is important nevertheless. I loved the bit about the Bush youtube clip. And the cult of death, particularly the hero-worship of suicide bombers (a relatively new phenomenon in Afghanistan) rings very true if you have seen James Miller's Death in Gaza. The way that young, ignorant armed men with some legitimate grievances are obsessed with violence and death, and their hilarious habit of assuming the roles on American troops in computer games where they hunt down Islamists is also interesting.
That Obama is more hated by these militants than Bush, since he is seen as escalating the war is also something that I would say we need to know.
Rohde's assertion that continuing widespread Pakistani support, particularly from their intelligence service is supplying and controlling parts of the militant network within Afghanistan is again hardly news, but crucial in understanding why Hillary Clinton has faced such hostility within Pakistan in the last few days during her visit.
I found the maps and the 3-D graphics helpful. It is good to see where South Waziristan is. This area has been at the centre of a huge news story all this year. Personally, being something of a topographical idiot, I can always do with more of these graphics and I would have loved to have had them when I have went to the Tribal areas. Unfortunately, that was before the geography of this remote and mysterious area was made so accessible. Likewise, it's useful to see that North Waziristan exists as well. I didn't know that the Taliban in conjunction with the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service, uses fighters from there to launch attacks on Afghanistan. That the ISI views South Waziristan as an internal enemy and is therefore engaging them in the current huge military assault says an awful lot about the double game that Pakistan's military apparently continue to play.
I'd like to know more about all of this, but I will keep reading his excellent text.
After reading all of Mr Rohde's text, I must say I feel somewhat cheated. There's hardly anything in the "interactive" videos that you can't read in the longer text. Still like the maps, though.
He somehow makes an undoubtedly gripping story completely uninteresting - he conveys none of the visceral sense of what he must have been going through. I'll have to give the text piece a try.
Thought: perhaps his nerves are still a bit shot from it all, explaining his demeanour?
An addictive piece of writing. Both extremely interesting for the details and gripping because of the feeling and pace. I've been following the text pieces since they were first published and yes: the quality of the print pieces is completely opposite for the 'interactive video'. Several thousand words cut into 5x1min pieces automatically makes me jump a little and question the decision. And yes, you can see, that Mr. Rohde is a print journalist not a video journalist.