Press
Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities | By Candis Callison and Mary Lynn Young, Oxford University Press | December 2019
U.S. freelance journalist Carrie Ching pitched the idea for a first-person behind-the-scenes series on journalists’ experiences in the field to Vice Media in 2013. Her pilot—which wasn’t published with the rest of the series—was about a journalist who accidentally got “high on the job” and had a “paranoid breakdown” after eating a pot brownie while reporting on medical marijuana. The format was animated graphic video with voices provided by the journalists themselves. It was a perfect genre to explore and experiment with her professional interests in thorny questions of visual journalism and topics that ranged from “sensitive” to “brutal” …
Experimental Storyteller: Carrie Ching ’95 | Punahou Bulletin | Winter 2015
“I work with a lot of dark and disturbing topics. Using illustration makes the story more accessible; it seems to give people some emotional distance, yet draws them in a way that traditional documentaries can’t,” says Ching.
Sule’s Story: Inside One of California’s Most Troubled Juvenile Homes | Narratively | 4/2/15
ProPublica talked to investigative reporter Joaquin Sapien and multimedia journalist Carrie Ching about their investigation of the home run by a company called EMB Families First, Sule’s story, and how they translated such sensitive material into an illustrated film.
Interview with Carrie Ching | Multimedia Week | 3/7/15
In this episode we talk with award-winning multimedia journalist and producer Carrie Ching www.carrieching.com about her career, and how she built her niche in illustrated features and documentaries. Her films include an investigation into the abuse of developmentally disabled residents in state-run institutions in California and an interview with the Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden.
Ideas for visualizing the news | Futures Lab at RJI | 2/4/15
Carrie Ching has created award-winning work such as “In Jennifer’s Room” that weaves art and audio into compelling multimedia narratives, such as her latest project “Correspondent Confidential.” We find out how these pieces come together.
Behind the Scenes of VICE’s Illustrated Documentary Series | Storybench | 12/3/14
Carrie Ching likes to put images to words. Correspondent Confidential, the series she conceived and sold to Vice, conveys powerful stories told by journalists in conflict zones. They achieve what a mini-doc sometimes can’t–a distillation of the events in hindsight with the freedom of illustration.
Illustrated Journalism | Columbia Visuals | 10/6/14
Reporters are also going beyond the classic panel-style comic. Carrie Ching, the former senior multimedia producer at the Center for Investigative Reporting, used illustration to tell visual stories that were difficult to tell through video or photo.
How comics journalism brings stories to life | Columbia Journalism Review | 9/19/14
“Very dark, disturbing stories can be more effective with illustration because it allows the viewer a bit of emotional distance from the subject matter—it makes it less overwhelming, easier to digest,” said Carrie Ching, who led multimedia projects at CIR until last year.
Your Call: How are journalists using the web as a platform to innovate? | KALW Your Call | 7/15/14
So where are you seeing good online documentary work? And what’s the power of web technology to enhance news and storytelling? Join the conversation on the next Your Call with host Rose Aguilar and Elaine McMillion Sheldon, documentary storyteller, visual journalist, and producer of “Hollow,” an interactive web documentary that communicates the issues of rural America through the eyes, voices and ideas of Southern West Virginians; Jeff Soyk, media artist, and designer and architect on the interactive documentary “Hollow”; and Carrie Ching, independent multimedia journalist and former senior producer of multimedia at the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Vice, the News Entity, Grows on HBO and Online | New York Times | 6/29/14
The website is called Vice News, so it’s fair to expect racy images in a film titled “Posing as a Prostitute in a Turkish Brothel: Correspondent Confidential.” There are no salacious pictures. There isn’t even any video. As Mimi Chakarova, a Bulgarian-born journalist, describes how she tried to infiltrate the forced prostitution business, her account is illustrated with exquisite watercolor drawings that faintly recall Matisse’s paintings of Morocco.
Vice News tells personal stories of journalists through illustrated series | Journalism.co.uk | 6/27/14
Series producer Carrie Ching said she knows first hand from working with investigative journalists that some of the best stories do not go into the final piece. One of the goals of the project was to “expand the way that we tell stories in journalism by allowing the reporter to be part of the story”.
Vice’s Correspondent Confidential Reveals Journalists’ Untold Stories | MediaBistro/Fishbowl NY | 11/20/13
There are two distinct narratives for journalists covering the same story for a long time: the story they publish, and the story they tell themselves or their friends over a beer. Producer Carrie Ching wants to reveal those untold personal stories with her new Vice web series, Correspondent Confidential, which screened last night at the Explorer’s Club on the Upper East Side.
Vice Media’s ‘Correspondent Confidential’ brings journalists’ hard-to-tell stories to popular audiences | Capital New York | 11/19/13
Carrie Ching, multimedia journalist and producer, focused on Chararova’s experience making the film for “Correspondent Confidential,” her new series telling the stories of documentarians and journalists telling their stories. Distributed to Vice media’s global audience, which is 63 percent male, Chakarova finds that now her film is being sought out by an audience she never thought she’d reach.
New Vice series animates journalists’ stories | Poynter | 10/17/13
When Carrie Ching recorded Mimi Chakarova telling the story of how she posed as a prostitute to research her film, The Price of Sex, she turned the lights out. “I wanted it to feel really intimate. Like a confessional,” Ching said.
‘Correspondent Confidential’ Debuts on VICE | MediaBistro/Fishbowl NY | 10/17/13
The six-part illustrated documentary series is the brainchild of Carrie Ching, a veteran digital storyteller with Berkeley’s Center for Investigative Reporting. As she explains to New York Observer media reporter Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke, the Web series came together quickly after she pitched VICE in May.
New Animated Vice Series Tells Journalist’s Story Behind The Story | New York Observer | 10/16/13
When multimedia journalist Carrie Ching was at the UC, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, she realized that the story she ended up writing was never the whole story and sometimes not even the most interesting part.
J-School Alumna Nominated for Emmy Award | Graduate Division, UC Berkeley | 8/12/13
While multimedia skills helped her to win an Emmy recognition, Ching acknowledged that her solid foundation in narrative nonfiction storytelling has been her most useful skill over the years.
Q&A: Multimedia Producer, Carrie Ching | ReportHers | 5/22/13
An interview with Carrie Ching about multimedia journalism, animated and graphic storytelling, and being an independent producer in today’s media industry.
News organizations experiment with ‘illustrated storytelling’ | Poynter | 3/20/13
When telling stories about sensitive topics, it’s easy to stick with storytelling forms that are familiar. But some news organizations, such as Center for Investigative Reporting, have begun experimenting with a new way to tell serious stories — one that involves illustrations, narration and in-depth reporting. Individually, these storytelling forms aren’t new. But combined, they represent what I believe is a new and innovative type of journalism.
Funny Business | Nieman Storyboard | 2/8/13
The animated pieces, “The Price of Gas” and “The Hidden Cost of Hamburgers,” Ching says, are among the most-watched videos CIR has produced, and it’s easy to see why. Cartoon cars and flatulent cows pull the audience along in a way that a PowerPoint slide never could. Like Krulwich, Ching has found that humor helps information soak in.
Let’s All Send Off 2012 With The Year’s Best YouTube Documentaries | TubeFilter | 12/31/12
The Hidden Costs Of [Hamburgers], take[s] full advantage of the medium; that particular documentary mixes a short-form style (it is eight minutes long) with the sort of kinetic visuals frequently applied to text-based videos. [It has] accrued more than 160,000 views, and [is one of the] most popular videos on the I Files channel.
California Watch tells difficult story with video, tweets (and text) | Poynter | 11/31/12
“We decided early on against doing an animated version because the subject matter was so heavy,” Ching said. They settled on a subtly animated graphic novel-like approach with illustrations by Marina Luz. “It just makes it a little more digestible for viewers,” Ching said. “It doesn’t overwhelm them as much.” … The video opens by introducing you to “Jennifer”: “I think Jenny was 6, 7, 8 months old; I could see something wasn’t right, I knew it,” says an actor reading a transcript of a Gabrielson interview with Jennifer’s mom. That feeling of something not being right pervades the creepy yet beautiful video.
How much does a hamburger cost? That depends | NPR: The Salt Blog | 8/20/2012
This video, created by the Center for Investigative Reporting, is one of the latest and most complete representations of a patty’s global impact. We commend the reporters at the CIR for their diligence; compiling consistent information in this field is no easy task, and we should know.
News group serves up the hidden costs of hamburgers | Berkeleyside | 8/10/12
Berkeleyside checked in with the director-producer-reporter of “The Hidden Costs of Hamburgers”, Berkeleyean and CIR staffer Carrie Ching, to find out more about the cartoon concept behind this serious short on mass-produced meat.
Animating the future of investigative reporting | California Watch | 9/9/11
Ching’s challenge working with Jones, who is based in New York, on the “Suspect America” animation was to present a deep investigative story on which CIR reporters Schulz and Andrew Becker had spent a year, including five months with NPR. She was able to distill it into a four-minute video. Ching consolidated the endless documents, data and interviews down to a script that was more lighthearted than our main investigation but preserved the credibility and accuracy of the original report. The idea was that we wanted the animation to let a potentially different audience know that suspicious activity reports exist and that they might be relevant to their lives.