About

This project, W&L at a Crossroads: Direction of Diversity is Not Black and White, was reported, written, produced and designed by eight students who enrolled in a journalism course, Multimedia Storytelling Design, taught by Professors Jeff Barry and Toni Locy in winter 2018 at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.

Students majoring in journalism, strategic communication and business studied how The New York Times and The Guardian put together their Pulitzer Prize-winning interactive stories, Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek and NSA Files Decoded: What the Revelations Mean for You.

They then went “behind the curtain” and learned web design skills through HTML and CSS, and used other digital tools to imagine, design and create powerful, compelling interactive features with audio, video, graphics—and words—that are on the cutting edge of journalism and mass communications.

Julia Udicious '19, Alison Murtagh '19, Liz Janisse '19, Bryn McCarthy '19, Kathryn Young '19, Jenna Choi '19, Caroline Boras '18, Xiaoxia Yin '19.

We are deeply grateful to Amberly Wang, Class of '18, who is majoring in math and studio art, for her beautiful drawings that appear in the The Greek Life and The Path Ahead sections of this project.

We also want to thank Dave Pfaff, an academic technologist in the university’s IQ Center, for helping Xiaoxia Yin use a drone to take the aerial photo of Lee Chapel.

We would also like to thank Tommy Willingham, '19, an Economics and Math double major, for allowing us to use a photo he took in Charlottesville in August 2017, on the day white nationalists and counter-protesters clashed in the streets. He took the photo at the corner of Water and 4th streets, shortly before police say a white nationalist supporter drove a car into the crowd, killing Heather Heyer.

Published April 9, 2018