Tomorrow, January 30th, will be the 30th anniversary of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. I remember, in that pre-social media era, hearing the announcement on the public address system at my middle school. There will no doubt be a lot of reflection of that fateful day in the media. One of those such retrospectives is on the website of KUSA Channel 9, a local NBC affiliate here in Denver, Colorado. It’s called 30 Years and 73 Seconds: The Challenger Disaster. What’s unique about this retrospective is that a good portion of the video footage was recorded from Cape Kennedy on that day. The archived footage includes elementary school kids from Boulder watching the launch and seeing their stunned reactions to the incident, which NASA officials announced as a “major malfunction.”
We often think of digital storytelling as from the perspective of the ordinary citizen with a smartphone rather than from a local news reporter with a camera crew. Since this particular digital story involves video content from the pre-YouTube era, it makes sense to incorporate broadcast journalism substance and style from the mid 1980s timeframe.
For this digital critique, I’ll focus on a few key areas:
- Research – The production team utilizes the archived video from 1986 well. The narrator and on-air journalist, Gary Shapiro, was on the ground in Florida then to cover a feature about the group of Boulder elementary kids who were sent to watch the Challenge launch. The web posting also includes an array of scanned photos, including the tragic photos of the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding. In addition, there is quite of bit of up-to-date footage of those students who are now in their middle age as well as Shapiro himself.
- Sense of audience – This was one key area in which the digital content was strongest. Anyone who was roughly the same age as the Boulder students could remember that day and how they felt both then and now. In my case, I was able to sympathize with them in a pre-9/11 era when I thought this was the biggest tragedy I had ever seen on TV. Fortunately, those students were able to overcome the adversity of that fateful day and witness the next shuttle lunch 18 months later.
- Media application – Like I mentioned in the research section, the production team made good use of the archived footage. The cross-cutting better the past and the present bridged the 30 year time gap. One criticism I have is the way the piece is narrated. Like most television journalists, Shapiro uses a certain cadence, with the wide range of inflection, that I sometimes find a bit too formulaic.
Unfortunately, the website doesn’t offer much flexibility in being able to embed the video into this blog, so you’ll have to click the link and jump to a new tab.