The uber talented Tom Vaillant recently attended a MediaStorm workshop and that kicked off a series of follow up conversations. Tom is a terrific storyteller and also an innovative technologist focused on investigative journalism using data and AI. He suggested that there could be a way to improve access to our archive of over 350 films by using semantic search which allows natural language queries by theme, connection or meaning. As Tom Says: “We ingested every published story, enriched it with AI-extracted metadata — topics, entities, themes, key quotes — and wired up hybrid retrieval with a visual gallery. Runs locally at query time, no API calls. Every media organization sits on an archive. Decades of footage, transcripts, reporting — catalogued well enough to store, but not well enough to search by meaning. AI changes that equation. It turns archives into knowledge bases — searchable, structured, and accessible in ways that weren't…

Lights in the Shadows was recognized in the 30th Annual Webby Awards as an honoree in the Video & Film - Documentary: Longform Category. The Webbys are known in the industry as the Oscar Awards of the internet. Congratulations to all the recognized films!

For the past 30 years I have been working with the The Kalish Visual Editing Workshop as faculty and a board member. I’m excited that we are now hiring an Executive Director to lead The Kalish in the future. For 35 years, The Kalish has served the journalism community through career-changing workshops attended by visual leaders throughout the profession. We are ready to be more. The Kalish Board of Directors is seeking our next leader to help us transform into an organization that supports visual editors throughout their careers. This is a newly defined role for the workshop, aimed at long-term growth in programming and financial stability. The deadline to apply is December 5th. Learn more and apply at the Kalish site.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of MediaStorm, a milestone that honors two decades of storytelling, collaboration, training, technical innovation and social impact.