Post Production Memo: Jrnl80 Increasing Food Prices

To begin, I thought about issues around me that impacted me directly. While doing weekly grocery shopping I’ve noticed the prices increasing dramatically. Things that I could once afford, I now can’t; sales I didn’t have to shop, I now do. I began to wonder how other people were dealing with the increases. I started researching different blog sites and found there were many dedicated to helping readers save money at the grocery store. Bloggers recommended several sites with printable coupons, tips on saving money and how to shop their local sales more effectively. After realizing how many people were struggling with the same issue, I did some hard research.

First, I interviewed Omar Rodriguez, the General Manager of Associated food stores of Long Beach. I wanted to know what he’s noticed in his store and where he’s seen prices increasing. Next, I visited the Labor Department online statistics to get a better idea of what products were really increasing. I wondered: exactly how much had milk gone up over the past year? After gathering the hard data, I wanted to know why. Several articles in the NY Times stated the cost of food was due to the increasing price in fuel as well as growing global demand. I read over all this and went to Hofstra University Economics Professor Martin Melkonian with my own questions.

After meeting with Prof. Melkonian I wanted to see what the general public thought. I went to Waldbaum’s near Hofstra and started asking customers as they exited the store. Unfortunately, not many were willing to talk on camera about the topic. I did, however, get two interviews. One had no usable bites but the other, with Barbara and Richard Picard of North Merrick, was very helpful.

After getting interviews and gathering my data I wrote out my written piece, while editing onto the Nassau News website. After that, I took pictures inside Associated in Long Beach of items on the shelf and particular items that had seen the largest rise in price. These pictures I then uploaded to Flickr.com and wrote captions to display my story through photographs. Then, I wrote my script for my standups in the video and filmed them. It was then that I ran into the biggest snag. Windows Media Player stopped working on my computer. Fortunately, I had saved everything on blip.tv and was able to retrieve it all on another computer. However, I lost a lot of time re-editing and cutting clips down.

Overall, it was a huge learning experience. I learned a lot about different mediums and how to tell a story in many different ways. If I do it again, I think it’ll go much more smoothly. When I look back on the final pieces, I’m amazed I did all that with all those different types of web technology. I feel much more comfortable with all the different web tools I incorporated and confident that I could do an even better job if given the task again.