In conversation with:

Chastity Pratt

Tuesday | September 24th, 2019 | 12:00 – 1:30 PM

MIT Open Documentary Lab | E15-318

MIT Campus, Wiesner Building, 20 Ames Street, 3rd Floor, Cambridge MA 02142

Watch the lecture.

Multimedia collaborative storytelling: lessons for future griots

Chastity Pratt will talk about what multimedia storytelling looks like and how it comes together within the context of the growing trend known as collaborative journalism. Drawing from her experience within a multimillion-dollar nonprofit initiative that seeks to grow audiences in the face of shrinking traditional journalism, she will show how digital, visual, audio and documentary professionals cooperate to tackle small and large stories.

It will be a talk not only about the passion, people and tools needed to meld different media, but also about the indomitable human desire to storytell.

Chastity Pratt is a journalist who has covered government and politics at several news organizations across the country, most recently as urban affairs reporter for Bridge Magazine, a digital nonprofit news outlet in Michigan. She previously provided authoritative education coverage at the Detroit Free Press for more than a decade.

Pratt played an integral part in the Detroit Journalism Cooperative, a five-year collaboration of digital, TV, radio and ethnic media that co-reported on stories such as the Flint water crisis, Detroit municipal bankruptcy filing and Trump-era deportations. In a constantly-evolving content provider role, she told stories across platforms and reimagined content for both shared and divergent audiences. 

Her work also has appeared in USA Today, Essence Magazine, on PBS, NPR and CNN. Pratt is currently a Nieman fellow at Harvard studying how multimedia storytelling can amplify stories that advocate for education finance reform while maintaining journalistic integrity.