The BBC is coming to Baton Rouge for the entire month of October to produce several documentary-style television and online reports about the region. The team is called BBC Pop Up and is made up of video journalists from the UK, Italy and the US.
They’re holding a community meet-up on Tuesday, Oct. 7 at 7 p.m. inside LSU’s Journalism Building, inviting students and area residents to come out and suggest what video stories should be made about their local community. They want to hear what issues matter most to you in your area.
BBC Pop Up is the BBC’s first mobile bureau and it is traveling around the US for six months, living and working in a different area for one month at a time. Its journalists are strictly crowdsourcing ideas for their reports from those living in each town as a way empower local communities to tell their own stories.
These video stories will be broadcast to 350 million homes on BBC World television and online at BBC.com/popup. The team has already spent the month in Boulder, Colorado, covering topics ranging from clips for semi-automatic weapons , sexual assaults on college campuses to eating disorders and flood recovery.
In their spare time, the crew will teach free video journalism workshops at LSU and be freely accessible to students who want to talk about working in journalism. At the end of the month, the Pop Up team will produce a 30-minute compilation of video reports about the region, its residents, and the BBC’s interaction with the community.