YouTube's “Project:Report” Video Finalists Selected

We've been following the progress of the YouTube Aspiring Citizen Journalist competition “Project:Report” organized along with the Pulitzer Center to select an amateur video journalist to win a 10 000 USD fellowship to film a story of their choice. The finalists have been selected, and we'll present three of them to you.

The 10 finalists have been selected from the dozens of submissions, now they will produce another video for the second round and among these the audience will vote for their favorite. On the YouTube blog they have included a video with advice for this second round, on how to make the story appeal to wider audiences.

The 10 finalist videos can be seen here. However, it seems all the finalists are from the Continental US, leaving me with the desire to have seen products from other places around the world. Nevertheless, several of the finalists’ videos touch on certain topics related to minorities and migration issues.

In Living Between Borders, inongimke presents the life of a young woman who is after being raised in the US, still doesn't have a legal migratory status, although all the rest of her family has been able to get the residence. This young woman lives looking at the opportunities out there that she can't access because she doesn't have a social security number, and the fear that one day they may separate her from her daughter and send her back to Mexico.

In De tu papá/From your father, sandracroa also brings us the story of an illegal immigrant living in the US, working as a day laborer and missing his family back home. He is unable to be with his daughter at her “quinceañera” coming of age party, and sends a video instead, knowing that estrangement is the payoff for being able to provide for his family from afar.

Skycitygirl brings us Rachel, her Grandmother's memoirs growing up as an acoma Native American Indian in a reservation, remembering how school enforced only English rules, when many students only knew their Native American languages, and how she remembers loving the scent and licking the clay whitewash on the walls of her childhood home.

The deadline for submitting videos to the 2nd round is November 9th, and voting will be soon after that.

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