LA Stage Times ran a story about Engine 31, a pop-up newsroom created and led by Sasha Anawalt and Douglas McLennan.
Engine 31, supported by USC Annenberg and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, is the fourth in a series of pop-up newsrooms, which “pop-up” to cover an event and produce a series of stories that get archived on the web.
“If you think about it, it just simply makes sense,” Anawalt said of pop-up newsrooms. “Pooling resources and aggregating sources, pulling together a newsroom to cover a festival where much is happening and then people disappear back again into their worlds, it’s such a sensible thing.”
Engine 31 popped up to cover the last weekend of the 37th annual Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Kentucky. The newsroom consisted of Anawalt, Douglas and 10 other handpicked arts journalists from around the country. The content produced from the festival was posted to Engine31.org in the form of written pieces, interviews, reviews, videos and more.
“When people are together, especially seeing the same thing and doing the same thing, something magical happens,” Anawalt said. “That’s really what reporters like to do. They don’t want to be ‘assigned’ necessarily. They want to discover stuff and then tell people about it.”
Engine 31 was also featured in a story from the Courier-Journal.
