As he did with his classic textbook on photojournalism, Kobré based much of his groundbreaking videojournalism textbook on the experiences of working professionals.
He recorded his in-depth conversations with these masters of their art on Zoom.
This website features videos of Kobré and his subjects exploring how the pros originated their ideas, the thought processes that transformed ideas into story arcs and then into pieces for online or broadcast. The book draws liberally but only partially from these informative and often entertaining interviews.
Follow links below to conversations and searchable transcripts for each featured professional.
Staci Beard
Staci Beard is engagement editor for Global Press Journal, an award-winning digital publication. Beard was journalist-in-residence at Notre Dame de Namur University and taught digital media courses at San Francisco State University and the University of Tennessee. She was associate director of digital and social media at the Stanford School of Engineering, senior internet marketing manager for Lucasfilm, innovations project manager for E.W. Scripps Newspaper Interactive, multimedia project manager for MSN Money and a community manager for CBS Interactive.
Travis Fox
Travis Fox is credited with establishing a new form of video storytelling on the Internet. In the 10 years he spent at the Washington Post, Fox covered every major conflict in the first decade of the 21st century including Iraq, Afghanistan, and several reporting trips in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America. Fox also worked for FRONTLINE on PBS. He received the first Emmy Award presented to a web video producer. He was also the first and only person to win both the Editor of the Year and Videographer of the Year awards from the White House News Photographers Association.
Anne Herbst
Anne Herbst is the Director of Visual Journalism at KUSA-TV 9, Denver. Herbst shoots, writes, and edits mostly human-interest stories for her station. During her career, Herbst has been honored with four national Edward R. Murrow awards, dozens of Heartland Emmys, and was runner up for National Press Photographer of the Year.
Erik Olsen
Erik Olsen is a freelance journalist and filmmaker. He was the West Coast video correspondent for Quartz, and for 10 years was a senior video journalist for the New York Times, living in New York City and Berlin, Germany. For five years, he was an online and TV producer at ABC News.
Ed Robbins
Ed Robbins is an award-winning director-writer-producer and digital journalist. He's travelled extensively across America and internationally to countries that include Afghanistan, Burma, Colombia, Iraq, India, Liberia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Rwanda, South Sudan, and Syria. Over the past two decades, he's written-produced numerous hour programs for television outlets that include PBS, Discovery Channel, TLC, Nat Geo Channel, ABC, NBC, and in the UK: BBC2 and Channel 4. As a Digital Journalist and reporter his videos have been commissioned by the NY Times, Time Magazine, and the International Reporting Project. In addition, The New York Times stationed him at their Pakistan and Afghanistan Bureaus to report stories and train local Afghan staff in video storytelling. He also taught at Columbia University.
Bob Sacha
Bob Sacha freelanced for National Geographic for many years. He also took assignments for the Guardian and the New York Times. He shot the video for the Guardian US team project that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Sacha has also directed, produced, shot, and edited nonfiction video stories for Al Jazeera America Online, Yahoo News, Audubon Science, Apple, the Asia Society, Starbucks, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Open Society Foundation, among other international clients. For several years he worked as a staff producer and editor at Media Storm. Sacha taught Video Storytelling at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, City University of New York.
Jacob Templin
Jacob Templin is head of video at Thomson Reuters Foundation. He was an executive producer at Quartz and senior producer at TIME. His work has been published in The New York Times, Retro Report, and PBS. He has taught Multiplatform Storytelling at Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. He has covered women’s secret soccer leagues in Saudi Arabia, investigated the future of video games, and explained why Koreans have two ages.
Whitney Shefte
Whitney Shefte is a Peabody, Emmy, Murrow and Pictures of the Year International (POYi) award-winning senior video journalist. She began working for The Washington Post in 2006. She has documented everything from the opioid epidemic across the United States, to climate change in Greenland, to the forgotten conflict in Western Sahara.
Will Yurman
Will Yurman photographed and produced multimedia at the Democrat and Chronicle. He has also been a freelance photographer based in the Middle East as well as a photojournalist for the Associated Press. Yurman is now a professor at Penn State University.