2 November 2007
Calling America Nominated as Finalist in 2007Weblog Awards
Posted under places beginning with: Site News .
The nomination
We are proud and honored to have been nominated as a finalist in the ‘Best New Blog’ category of the 2007 Weblog Awards. Please take a minute of your time to vote for us! We want to say a big thank you to all of you who have read and contributed to Calling America so far. Without the generous story contributions of people on the ground in the States and readers all around the world, we would not have been able to get this far. Thank you.
The competition in our category is incredibly strong and our chances of winning extremely minimal, but this could be the very chance to attain our dream of taking our work to the US and embarking on phase 2 of the Calling America project (more info on that below). In any case we are just grateful for the recognition of our work.
The project so far
Calling America is a project that my brother and I set up at the end of September 2007. It is the first half of a two-part project that aims to take a documentary angle on people in places across the USA. The first phase is web-based and is what you see before you now. It involves collecting stories from real people in real places across the US and sharing them with the widest audience possible. In doing so, we hope to paint an independent, personal and alternative picture of the US, to offer a counterpoint to the portrayal of the US in mainstream media. We are not out to change the world, rather we are interested in stories and we’d like to build connections with people using the Internet as a medium of expression and to facilitate cultural exchange and understading. The second part of the project is still in the making. But essentially it involves an actual journey to the US which will draw on the stories collected in the first phase (web phase) to then create and disseminate a project on the ground in the US.
Reassessing Calling America
We launched the first phase of the project, purposely without defining strict parameters. We are now 2 months into the project and have reached a reassessment and planning stage for the year ahead. This planning includes some fundamental changes to the goals of the Calling America website. We are working on a clearly defined project outline that covers both phases 1 and 2 and increases the poignancy and resonance of the project in tune with our artistic vision and ways of working.
This does not mean that what we have created so far will go to waste, be forgotten or neglected in any way. No. Calling America is primarily about storytelling, so we will continue to welcome and promote contributions from people across the US. The new version of Calling America will use the existing material, learn from this initial experience and build on it so that the whole project becomes more succinct both internally and externally. In other words, what you are witnessing is the real time transformation of an artistic work in progress. We’ll disclose more information on future developments as and when they become fixed. Thanks for reading.
