The Road Less Traveled: Changing the World One Story at a Time

Multimedia storytelling pioneer Rich Beckman, the James L. Knight professor of visual communication at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication, gave the Roy H. Park Distinguished Lecture April 10 in Carroll Hall on the UNC campus.

Beckman’s presentation – “The Road Less Traveled: Changing the World One Story at a Time” – examined the rise of multimedia and its impact on the media industry.

For more than a decade, Beckman’s multimedia projects have been honored consistently as among the best in the form of journalism that combines video, photography, audio, graphics and text to tell the stories of its subjects.

His teams have earned national and international recognition in multimedia competitions including the Pirelli INTERNETional Award for Educational Media, the Online News Association, the National Press Photographers Association, The Society for News Design, Horizon and the Pictures of the Year International competition.

Most recently, Beckman served as executive producer for one of the largest, most ambitious Web documentaries ever produced, www.specialolympicslive.org. The Web site includes video, photos and short documentaries featuring the thousands of athletes from the 2007 Special Olympics World Summer Games.

Beckman, who began his career as a photojournalist, has directed documentary photojournalism projects in the U.S. and around the world on subjects ranging from the island cultures of the West Indies to the behavior of grizzly bears and other endangered wildlife in North America and Africa.

Beckman will retire from Carolina this year to become the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the University of Miami’s School of Communication.

Take the following links to sample projects that Beckman or his students have produced:

specialolympicslive.org

atacamastories.org

whitecitystories.org

chiloestories.org

www.rcrusoe.org

theancientway.org

moreheadscholars.org

alivingstage.org

tenyearson.org

For more information, contact Morgan Ellis at (919) 843-0472 or This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it