FIU journalism students create innovative video series on HIV/AIDS


Since the presence of HIV/AIDS was first recorded more than 20 years ago, the news media have played a key role in educating the public about the illness. But with a challenging economy forcing staff cutbacks in newsrooms and scaled-back health reporting, the media’s recent coverage of the illness has been far less robust.

In South Florida, which has the third highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the nation, there is a great need to inform the community about the nature and scope of the epidemic.

 A dozen students at FIU’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication recently addressed that need by creating a series of remarkable videos focusing on the life story of HIV/AIDS activist Damaries Cruz. The videos will be posted on the Miami Herald  web site on March 2.

Supervised by Interim Associate Dean Allan Richards and Professor Kate MacMillin, the students in the Multimedia Journalism class worked four months to produce a series of four videos titled “The Stigma Stops with Me”.

Adopting a reality show approach, the videos follow the charismatic, 39-year-old Cruz, who works as a senior educator in the HIV/AIDS Office of the Miami-Dade County Health Department. The goal was to show what life is like for the activist, who is battling the illness.

The students interviewed Cruz, shot and edited the footage, and performed all audio and video functions. To learn more about the illness, they attended the National Minority AIDS Council Conference and the National Latino AIDS Awareness Day.

 “This is a groundbreaking way to get the message out about HIV/AIDS,” said Richards. “We are using a new medium – the Internet – to tell a dramatic story about a critical health issue.”

 A number of students in the Multimedia Journalism class have lost a relative to AIDS, which disproportionately affects minority communities. Nearly 70 percent of FIU journalism students are Hispanic, and 12 percent are African-American.

For Esteban Arrange, a student who worked as a producer/director, the experience was a wake-up call. “This project was very rewarding because we knew that we were helping to save lives,” he said.

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