43 GENIUS INTERVIEW Nonny de la Peña
versus giving them something that’s sensory and emotional? NONNY DE LA PEÑA: Well, both of those pieces are fact-based, with the same narrator for both pieces. They’re issues that are covered by traditional media all the time. But this immersive experience kind of removes the middle man. The National Butterfly Center is an emotive place, but it’s got a very important factual story. It might lose 70% of its land if there’s a border wall. I think it can be really hard to imagine that unless you see how it goes along the banks of the Rio Grande. The Mexico/US border is so far away. And so are the streets of Aleppo, right? It’s difficult to imagine, too, why people become refugees, but standing in the street like you are as a viewer when you watch Project Syria ; when you experience close to the kind of onslaught they’ve been exposed to there, you go ‘Oh, this could happen to me too’.
what’s happening. You’re literally standing next to a glacier as it recedes. And that’s probably the only way to actually get you to Greenland. After Solitary presented something that’s a very important issue for a lot of people, including prison wardens. You just can’t imagine what it’s like to be inside of the cell in solitary confinement unless you’re actually in it, so we created that experience. Journalistically, these stories are ones that are difficult to convey without really giving people a sense of being on scene. I think that’s something that runs across all of these – how do we tell a story that’s very difficult to access and make it readily understandable? But I think that’s our job as journalists. FEED: It seems like youʼre talking about wanting to give people this full sensory and emotional experience. How do you juggle that traditional ideal of presenting the cold hard facts,
I THINK WE’LL SEE SOMETHING IN THE FUTURE WHERE AR GLASSES, VR GLASSES AND YOUR PHONE WILL CONVERGE
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