Grassroots, Blue Skies: Stories That Fly. Here’s a project that inspires both great content and, well, corny flight cliches.
Kent State journalism professor Joe Murray and his project co-pilots Jacquie Marino and Gary Harwood (and their students) have flown all over the state of Ohio, shooting video, photographs, writing stories, all about the world of aviation. It’s a rich beat in a state that’s home to 18,000 pilots, 166 public airports, 772 private air fields, and a $10.5 billion flight industry.
Marino teaches the advanced storytelling class at Kent State; Harwood teaches photography. Murray is the new media czar. All of their students are on board. And, how often does a student reporter get to fly to an assignment in a plane piloted by a professor? Murray is expecting 25-30 stories to come out of it. And the stories are as colorful as the characters they cover:
- A hot-air balloon fair.
- A septuagenarian flight instructor.
- A 15-year-old, too young to drive, pilots her first plane.
- A small field airport owner who attracts 450 people to his airport diner every Sunday.
- Mechanics who can fix everything from the fabric on a 70-year-old antique to the most modern twin-engine turboprop.
- Airplane owners who donate time to fly sick patients to the hospital.
- A former steelworker who races pigeons at a local airfield.
Some of the features will be written by aviator/citizen journalists. Murray said Forest Barber, who owns an airfield and knows everyone, is interested in doing a column. He also has a grad student who might write a column called “Flight Groupie,” which would look at aviation traditions and rituals from a general public perspective.
“The aviation community is very enthusiastic about it,” said Murray. “I was starting to worry it might wear thin, since they are hearing from videographers, writers, photographers, going out multiple times, but it hasn’t.” The project has received positive press on campus.
Murray newest idea for the site is to put a video wall on the front page. “It was an epiphany for me. You’ll see 30 videos in a 3-D space, you can hover over them, as windows into each story.” The video wall creates the effect of looking out of the front of an airplane windshield.
Murray said he’s starting to plant some seeds for a public launch in the spring, possibly with an event at Kent State, which has a new J-school with a huge auditorium and three giant screens. He’s considering coupling the launch event with some usability testing on the site.
With the “skyrocketing” price of commercial air travel, you might wonder how much it costs for project staff and students to traverse the state by air. Murray said he can rent a 4-seat plane from Kent for $65 to $85 an hour or borrow a plane from a friend. Airplane fuel is $5 a gallon. He can take students 100 miles away in a 45-minute flight. “I can drop them off and pick them up in one day. Cutting travel time in half,” said Murray, who paraphrases an old bush pilot, “A mile of road will take you one mile. A half-mile of runway will take you anywhere.”
