Reign of Sand

Late last summer Circle of Blue, a global multi-media journalism project based here in Traverse City, sent a reporting team to Inner Mongolia, China to cover the front lines of the freshwater crisis in Asia. The members included a writer based in South Korea, a photographer from Australia, an artist and grasslands specialist from Beijing, and Eric Daigh, a videographer and multi-media producer from Circle of Blue’s main office in northern Michigan.

Circle of Blue’s strategy is to merge great independent reporting with the new online multi-media production and dissemination tools to elevate freshwater scarcity to a global priority. The project is the inspiration of Carl and Eileen Ganter, multi-media journalists who live in Traverse City and covered the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. They returned with the idea of doing what no mainstream media organization wanted to do: invest in producing great reporting and images to galvanize public attention around an emerging global environmental, cultural, and political crisis.

Circle of Blue is finishing its “Reign of Sand” multi-media report from Inner Mongolia, which includes more video, articles, photographs, and an interactive motion graphic map. This video is a taste of the great work to come from this online journalism project.