2231 california avenue iowa city iowa
319.541.7258
nbergus@gmail.com
“Below you will find examples of my written, audio, video and online work. I also blog about the food culture of Iowa at Death of a Pig If you have any questions, please contact me. I will gladly reply. ”
I'm facinated by people who work with food. But I get easily bored with chef-worshipping foodie fare. I wanted to write about real people with intimate connections to food. Since I live in Iowa, which produces a quarter of the nation's pork, I thought my own food writing had to involve pigs. So my master's project — conceived as both series of print pieces and multimedia package — is about pigs and the people who raise them, slaughter them and cure their meat.
In the process of reporting the story, I killed my own pig. There's video to prove it.
The Tampa Bay Rays' rise from one of the worst teams in baseball to American League East leader surprised a lot of people. Along with reporter Jacob Schneider, I wanted to explore how the surge in the standings and in attendance was affecting those who weren't staring on the field: the guys selling beer in the seats and the couple hawking parking spots a private lot.
For this report, produced for TBO.com and The Tampa Tribune, I reported, gathered and edited audio, produced two slideshows and built a Flash document to house the project.
As participant in the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund's 2008 online editing internship program, I spend a week at Western Kentucky University, in Bowling Green, Ky. Along with Mathilde Piard, Olivia Hubert-Allen, Michelle Rindels and I produced, over four days, a multimedia package about the one of the town's largest employers — the only Corvette plant in the world.
The package appeared in the Bowling Green Daily News, where the publisher said it's "what a multimedia package should look like."
As part of the master's professional program at the University of Iowa, graduate students work together to produce work on a central theme. This year's nine master's students decided to explore Islam in Iowa.
This was only the second time this class was offered and this time through we were able to work with multimedia: video, photography and audio. While the 16 stories and much of the photography appeared in a May 3, 2007, supplement to The Daily Iowan we needed a Web site to house the video and audio alongside the text and photography. I jumped at the chance to design, build and edit the online version.
A packaged and re-edited film review for a mocked-up entertainment Web site. The site uses xHTML 1.0 strict, cascading style sheets and a Macromedia Flash slide show of stills from the movie.
To accompany's The Tampa Tribune's A1 stories from Sunday, June 29 and and Monday, June 30 about the crush of home foreclosures in Tampa Bay. This tells the story of one of the market's winners — a man who cleans the trash and the people out of foreclosed homes for banks.
From Jan. 21 to April 15, The University of Iowa Museum of Art featured guest curator J. Sage Elwell's exhibit Dark Matters. I spent some time with Elwell while he explained the show's centerpiece: On Death, a 10-print work by German artist Max Klinger.
A four-minute audio feature produced in April 2008.
The lead-in:
When Johnson County's elected supervisors meet this Wednesday, they will talk about more than property taxes and land zoning. They will decide whether to allow a team to look for paranormal activity at one of the county's historic sites. Since early March, the Carroll Area Paranormal Team has been seeking permission to spend a night at the county's 153-year-old Poor Farm and Asylum. April may be six months too early for ghost stories, but Iowa Public Radio's Nick Bergus has one anyway.
A four-minute audio feature produced in May 2008.
The lead-in:
Shrapnel from an explosion nearly killed Bob Konrardy when he served in Viet Nam. His injuries forced him to abandon the Army platoon he was commanding. Last year, Bob returned to the battlefield, this time in Iraq. He spent his time with the same platoon he had commanded in Southeast Asia. Iowa Public Radio's Nick Bergus visited the veteran at his home on a rainy day in Davenport and has this report.
A 90-second vox pop about how people relate to food and cooking.
The lead-in:
The abundance of food in America means eating and cooking are no longer things done simply for sustenance. And while cooking game shows can be found across the TV dial - and physically eating at home, instead of on the go, is becoming more common - fewer and fewer meals are being cooked at home from scratch. So what is our relationship with food? We sent reporter Nicholas Bergus to downtown Iowa City over his lunch hour to find out.
When I cooked for a living, I worked with many Hispanics. Many avoided discussing the legality of their presence in America with an outsider like me.
One illegal Mexican co-worker was particularly articulate in English. He had taught himself the language by watching American DVDs with the subtitles turned on.
After working with him for two years, Palemon was willing to talk to me about what it was like to leave his family, walk through the desert and live in fear of being caught.
Around my daughter's first birthday, she demanded every night that we read a book titled My Big Animal Book before bed. It drove me nuts.
I couldn't be the only parent faced with this nightly ritual. So I swore I would find a book that could stand repetition and share it with the world.
North Liberty, Iowa, is a small enough town that a single politician (if you want to call those who serve on the city's volunteer commissions that) can push pet projects through.
Paul Osterholt, a commissioner on the planning and zoning board, thought it would be good idea to turn an old barn into a branch for the library that was just a mile away. When I spoke to the staff, they couldn't put a very positive spin on plan. When I asked Osterholt about the plan, it became clear he had not thought it through.