Sightless Man’s Inner Vision (“Hatteberg’s People”)

Probably few of you have heard of Larry Hatteberg, and fewer still of Bill Craft. But if you take a couple of minutes to watch this short feature about a sightless man from Kansas who wouldn’t let a war or the loss of his eyesight prevent him from achieving his goals, you probably won’t forget either one anytime soon.

Click here for a link to Larry Hatteberg’s feature story about Bill Craft, or click the image below.

Click the DVD cover image to watch Larry Hatteberg's feature on Bill Craft

Larry Hatteberg is sort of a Renaissance man in the TV industry…

He’s a reporter, videographer, anchor, and producer, but mainly he is a storyteller who is one of the best known journalists in Kansas. He has found a unique way of sharing the stories of ordinary Kansas People for many years on the KAKE-10 television station.

He is one of the pioneers of the “backpack journalist” model — a single person who reports, shoots, writes and edits his own stories, and then takes it a step further by anchoring newscasts as well. He has been at it for so long that his reel is pretty extensive, and his work is so popular he’s even able to sell DVDs with his feature stories.

I met Mr. Hatteberg in 2000 at the National Press Photographers Association News Video Workshop, where he shared some of his features and taught a segment on being a “one-man-band” with a camera. He focused on how everybody has a story worth telling, and on how to find it and share it in a memorable way. If you want to be a better storyteller in the multimedia world, I invite you to watch his work and see how he structures his feature pieces.

Here’s a link to many of his features, including the one on Bill Craft, and they are set up on a separate website with a higher-resolution video player: KansasPeople.com.

Hatteberg is one of several featured photojournalists in the new book “Roll!” which I just picked up on Amazon.com. I have had my eye on the title for a while, and I can say it is worth every penny if you are a multimedia storyteller. For years I had been looking for a book on the craft of photojournalism that would approach the level of value offered by the NPPA Workshop, and it just didn’t exist. Finally, a former NPPA instructor who now teaches at a university wrote the book, interviewing many of the top photographers and editors who are NPPA teachers and industry leaders, and put it all in a book.

If you can’t afford to fly to Norman, Oklahoma for the 2010 Workshop, I highly recommend getting this book as a poor substitute, and find online videos by each of the people interviewed in the book. It’s as close to Norman as you can get, and if you live outside the United States, it’s definitely a cost-effective way to get an NPPA-style education without leaving home.