bout a year and a half ago, Los Angeles-based BBC journalist Matt Danzico, head of BBC’s Video Innovation Lab (VIL) launched BBC Pop Up. It’s a project that’s akin to BBC Trending, another VIL programme, incorporating online discussions.
“There has to be a smarter way of involving data … in the story conception process,” says Danzico. “So we were thinking about how to include data, and how to gather data about what people were actually thinking about, outside of social media.” Thus, BBC Pop Up was born.
This travelling project is a joint venture between BBC US online and BBC World television. Danzico, who’s been in India since the beginning of this month, first took Pop Up to Boulder, Colorado, USA. There, he covered a series of multi-cultural adventures and ended up travelling through 19 states in the US over six months. The mobile bureau, which entirely relies on crowdsourcing for its story ideas, explores the meaning of being human; to transcend geopolitical boundaries and shatter narrow, divisive walls. In particular, Danzico and his team look at how communities across cultures relate to each other. After its maiden adventure, BBC Pop Up travelled to cities in Canada and Kenya before coming to India. “Typically, we ask communities what issues are important to them or what they find interesting,” says Danzico. “We do a story because it is suggested to us.” Pop Up uses three parameters to identify stories to document: unreported ideas, stories that haven’t been told well, and those that have received multiple recommendations. “We try to do stories on topics that people are already thinking about, and that aren’t necessarily in popular media,” says Danzico.
Ideas surface
In his first week here, Danzico and team conducted meetings in Delhi’s town hall and at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), from where most of their story ideas surfaced. One story, Danzico recalls fondly, revolves around Uber’s limitations in the developing world. When a rickshaw won a race against an Uber, Danzico concluded that the Indian GPS is not as advanced as its American counterpart causing his Uber driver to reach the wrong location.
Another story that materialised at IIMC was that of Varanasi’s drought problem. Attempting to highlight and identify specific issues, team Pop Up explored the arid location. One village in the region, had most of its women balding on account of carrying heavy pots of water on their heads every day. This hamlet relies on a small groundwater spring, which supplies water to 5,000 people every day. Talking to these forthcoming women, Danzico realised how grave the situation really was; that the unfortunate burden of collecting water had fallen upon the women, while the men sought employment. Another idea focussed the ostensibly dying generation of sari-weavers in Varanasi. Danzico, with Neha Sharma and Shalu Yadav, visited the holy city to document their craft and even broadcast their interactions, live from Periscope, a video-streaming app.
Tracing snake charmers
In a bold move, Danzico took up the issue of India being the land of snake-charmers with a view to understand changing perceptions and the Indian cultural evolution. A visual of a snake-charmer used in one of their videos, created controversy for BBC Pop Up even before they arrived. When Twitter users contradicted this perception of India, Danzico and team decided to explore contemporary India’s reality and whether we denigrate this image as a misrepresentative stereotype. Danzico and his colleague Vikas Pandey visited a village of erstwhile snake-charmers near Delhi. One of the inhabitants eagerly said they would support India in its embracement of development even if it meant obliterating their profession. However, they should be provided with alternative livelihood.
Pop Up went on to make a film, Where did India’s banned snake charmers go? , and posted a poll on their Twitter handle as a continuation of the film’s central question, “ Should India erase its snake charming culture to embrace modernity? ”.
Unfortunately, what had been initiated as an attempt to comprehend stereotypes ended up being misread as perpetuating them. This situation, however, only serves to exemplify what Danzico calls a transparent form of journalism with no hidden agenda, confronting even controversial topics.
Danzico spent 10 days in Mumbai and surrounding regions. Here, Danzico and team produced a music video for the first time, recording the city’s hip hop culture through artiste Vivian Divine. In a tweet, Danzico writes about being inspired by Divine’s take on positivity and mentorship within hip hop. The video, along with other Mumbai and Maharashtra-based stories, will be uploaded soon on BBC’s online platforms.
The road ahead
Future plans include building larger-than-life screens on thoroughfares in cities worldwide, which will live-stream pedestrians going about their daily business. This, will be an attempt to “give people a sense of their world,” to situate them in their histories and geographies. All these stories and more are uploaded on BBC’s various platforms.
Website: bbc.com; Instagram: @bbcpopup; Twitter: @BBCpopup
The writer is an intern at The Hindu
‘We ask communities what issues are important to them
or what they find interesting’
