When BBC Pop-Up journalists Matt Danzico and Benjamin Zand drove into Sioux Falls, S.D., they started hunting for stories in the way they always do—by going wherever people are hanging out. In the winter in Sioux Falls, that’s at the local supermarket. They pulled into the parking lot of the Empire Mall Hy-Vee, unloaded their banner from their car, and shuffled it inside and into one of Hy-Vee’s aisles, building a makeshift booth. When they were able to grab the attention of passing shoppers, they asked, simply, what they should report on.
Burmese refugees working in a turkey factory in nearby Huron, the residents of Sioux Falls replied. Or the local underground hip-hop and doom metal scenes, or Native American youth growing up on impoverished reservations.
Sioux Falls, a Great Plains city with a population of 160,000, doesn’t normally evoke such images, at least not with outsiders. And that’s exactly why Danzico and Zand hold their community meet-ups; after a few hours in a new city, they have a notion of where to begin.
These are the stories BBC Pop-Up is after—the kind that matter to locals. And so the team is traveling around the United States for six months in the hopes of finding more.
BBC Pop-Up emerged a few months ago from BBC’s Video Innovation Lab in London, a group created by BBC News’ director of digital publishing James Montgomery. Under Montgomery’s tutelage, Danzico and other staffers were tasked with considering new types of video programming for BBC News. The lab is behind initiatives such as BBC Trending, which investigates trending topics on Twitter, the BBC World Subreddit, and BBC Shorts on Instagram. These projects focus on bringing videos first to what Danzico calls the Internet’s “metropolitan hubs,” such as Reddit and Twitter—figuring out their application to the rest of the BBC will come later.
“We’re just a unit that creates new programming, staffs it, then leaves,” Danzico said. “They’re all experiments; 50 percent of what we create fails, but we like it when they fail because we learn a lot of lessons.”
According to Danzico, the BBC maintains 85 foreign bureaus around the world, including a few in the United States—but BBC Pop-Up is its first “mobile bureau.” Rather than maintain journalists in a main city like New York City or Washington, DC and then fly them out for on-location reporting, BBC Pop-Up drives or flies into smaller cities and spends a month at each. Reporters develop and film stories from within the community, aiming to make them relevant for a global audience, both online and on BBC World Television.
So far, Danzico and Zand, along with one rotating video journalist, visited Boulder, Baton Rouge, Pittsburgh, Sioux Falls, and now Tucson. In the month it’s reporting on a town, the BBC Pop-Up team tries to immerse itself in the community. In addition to setting up booths in supermarkets to crowdsource story ideas, the three reporters have dinner with the people the meet, strike up conversations in bowling alleys, take advice from locals on well-maintained Twitter and Tumblr accounts, and trade information and technical knowledge with area journalists.
“The most important part of this project is to make friends,” Danzico said. “The formula for BBC Pop-Up is ‘outside eyes with insider information.’ ”
This process lends a level of intimacy to the stories BBC Pop-Up produces. Its reporters try to serve as a vehicle for stories each community wants told, Danzico says, and as a result they gain insights on people, groups, and trends that escape most visiting journalists. And what is important to one community, BBC Pop-Up found, will often resonate with people across the globe.
Take a three-minute piece on Highland Coffees, a beloved Baton Rouge shop that nearly closed due to a lease dispute, but whose patrons stepped in, petitioning for it to remain open. It became one of the Pop-Up’s most successful stories, all because, Danzico hypothesizes, it was less about a particular event than about a universal idea.
“They’re talking about this coffee shop, but what they’re talking about more broadly is globalization, the flattening effect,” Danzico says. “They’re talking about change, without ever saying change. The coffee shop is a variable.”
In Colorado, the standout piece was on a flood that killed a single man in the tiny town of Jamestown in 2013. While not a large enough tragedy to normally attract BBC attention, Danzico and Zand found that the residents’ stories of loss, bravery, and resilience spoke to a larger sense of identity, an ongoing theme in the team’s reporting.
Despite the Pop-Up’s desire to get close to each community, by default the project maintains a certain distance. Its reporters are still outsiders. “I can safely say that every single place, I have not known anything about it,” said Zand, who hails from Liverpool, England. “I like to leave my learning for when I’m at that place. My preconceptions change every single hour.”
That peculiar journalistic distance has allowed BBC Pop-Up to critically consider both the outside impressions of certain areas and the actual feelings residents have of themselves. It’s an angle that came across best in a piece on both Pittsburgh, the city voted by Gawker as having the ugliest accent in America, and nearby Scranton—Danzico’s hometown—named by a 2014 National Bureau of Economic Research study as the unhappiest region in America. To the residents, the outside image fails to match up with their experience.
“Come hang out for a weekend and see if it’s an unhappy place,” said one Scranton resident, hanging out in the Loyalty Barber Shop. “I don’t feel that at all.”
BBC Pop-Up produces between four and six videos, about three-to-six minutes each, and one more comprehensive 30-minute documentary per location. While they haven’t cemented the perfect recipe—a few videos have flopped, including one on voodoo spells in Lafayette, La., that Danzico swore would “do gangbusters”—the venture has thus far proved worthwhile. Danzico is already trying to figure out how to make BBC Pop-Up sustainable beyond its original six-month mandate.
“We’re looking for stories that speak to a larger human condition across borders and oceans, and we’re not nailing it every time,” Danzico says. “We’re flying by the seat of our pants, by some degree, but we hope the stories we’re doing are at least aimed toward that idea.”
Gabriel Rosenberg is a Pittsburgh-based journalist going to school in Connecticut, and a former intern for CJR. He tweets on @GabrielJR.