5:07Minneapolis is the focus of Soledad O'Brien's next "Black in America" documentary series scheduled to debut in October.
"We are looking specifically at charter schools and public schools and how they educate black boys, especially boys in poverty. In a lot of ways I think Minneapolis is a tale of two cities," O'Brien told me last week when she was here giving a keynote address at the inaugural North By Midwest Summit. The event was hosted by advertising company Olson. The founder of MTV, the founder and CEO of the Huffington Post, a BuzzFeed official and many other media players spoke at the daylong event.
Speaking in her capacity as the CEO of Starfish Media Group, the production company she founded after parting ways with CNN, O'Brien talked about her passion for doing stories of interest to her that matter; things that she would let her four children watch. She was very clear about how uninterested she is in the Kardashians and Jodi Arias.
She's a colleague with whom I've become friendly, first via e-mail and more lately Twitter, for whom I have great admiration because of her accomplishments in front of the camera and her endeavors away, which include a foundation she and her husband started to help girls faced with obstacles to get beyond them. I like her because she is the same person on camera as off, as you'll see in my startribune.com/video, in which she's helping haul my camera equipment dressed in a sexy dress and heels.
Q What do you say to people who roll their eyes when they hear you are working for Al Jazeera America?
A The same thing I say to people who say HBO Sports? What do you know about sports? CNN? You're working for CNN? People who think I am working exclusively for anybody don't really understand the philosophy behind Starfish Media Group, my new company. The entire philosophy is to be able to take the things that I like doing, long-form pieces about people whose stories are undertold, digging into stories doing sort of aggressive interviews about issues that matter, and doing them across many platforms. We have CNN, HBO, Al Jazeera, National Geographic and a number of other partners we're going to be announcing over the next couple of weeks. And they're big. I think those are just people who don't understand what I'm doing. I think there's a new model of media, honestly. I feel like I'm a little bit at the cutting edge of that. We're creating something very different as the model is changing very dramatically.
Q Why Starfish?
A There's a myth that lots of evangelicals use. I heard the story when I was in Haiti doing a documentary, "Rescue," about Haiti's orphans. The earthquake had just happened; we were covering children dying. It was horrible, and Haiti was bad before the earthquake, but after it was horrific. I would say, "Why are you here? You have a passport?" The woman had 56 orphans in her care in a sea of 450,000 orphans and she said to me, "You know the starfish story. A boy is walking along the beach, tides gone out, all these starfish had been beached. So he starts picking up starfish and chucking them back in. A man comes up and says, 'What are you doing? This beach goes on for miles. There are literally a million starfish on this beach. You're wasting your time.' And the kid picks up a starfish and says, 'Well, I guess it matters to this one,' and chucks it in." It became a theme for our documentary about Haiti's orphans. Her philosophy was, someone's going to have to lead Haiti in a new era, and it could be one of her 56. For me it was: These stories do matter. You feel like you're out slogging away at these stories that are untold. I don't run into other [news] people doing those stories. [She laughs.] They are the stories about the American fabric. I thought it was a really good analogy for what I was trying to do. Starfish always regenerate. There's not much you can do to kill that starfish.
