paul stanton

Project Overview

Timeline: 1 week

I created this interactive story map for The Digital Ink: a website hosting the work of the 2016 Walter Cronkite Summer Journalism Institute.

Myself and the other photojournalists in the program had been taking photos of the street art and graffiti around downtown Phoenix. I wanted to create a website that contextualized these photographs.

Process

I decided to use StoryMapJS, a then new tool created by Northwestern University’s Knight Lab. For each major street art spot I wrote a short piece of journalistic writing to give context to the photographs. The map gives the exact position where the photograph was taken to encourage the reader to explore downtown on foot for themselves.

The piece ends with a video interview given by a team of Digital Ink journalists with street artists and the curator of a local Latino art museum.

Street Art of Downtown Phoenix
by Paul Stanton

Open Story Map

Reflection & Takeaways

This is a piece of work that came together organically. While working on my other stories for the Summer Journalism Institute I, and many of the other journalists, did a lot of walking around Phoenix getting on-the-street interviews. We all noticed the prevalence and high quality of the street art, and some of started taking pictures.

I decided that this was an opportunity to make something, so I wrote a proposal and pitched it to the editors. It ended up being my favorite piece I created for The Digital Ink, because it allowed me to collaborate with all the other photojournalists and sprung naturally from what we were excited by.