A reporter in Potter County, Pennsylvania, Melissa Troutman, shared her ongoing investigation of fracking in the area with budding documentarian Joshua Pribanic in April 2011. Roughly two years later, their film Triple Divide not only helped change the public perception of fracking, but became the lens for the duo to examine power, politics, regulation, and much else in Pennsylvania. The two formed Public Herald, a nonprofit investigative news organization that covers a single issue, fracking, in depth. Public Herald’s work led Jon Stewart to tackle fracking on The Daily Show, in a segment that Pribanic and Troutman helped create.
100Reporters spoke with Pribanic and Troutman about Triple Divide’s success and upcoming projects based off that model.
100Reporters: When was the movie released?
Joshua Pribanic: It was released in the spring of 2013. We did a screening at an old theater in Potter County, near where we filmed. It is actually a very small county … but people came from all over the state — we ended up having more than 200 people standing.
We got some celebrity assistance. Mark Ruffalo — who of course has been a really strong anti-fracking advocate — did a co-narration with Melissa. Ruffalo has been really helpful with distributing it and talking to people about it.
100R: Tell me how you use film in terms of your day-to-day investigative reporting. Is that where your most important stuff is — on film?
Melissa Troutman: Most of our work is on film. That might be due to the nature of what we are covering. Josh and I are the only investigative news team exclusively covering fracking in the Northeast part of the Pennsylvania. So we are not only gathering huge amounts of data, but we are also telling really intimate stories. Film is the perfect way, and really the only way, to show what people are actually experiencing.
100R: I don’t know if you face the same issues as the print-based news outlets do — for us the big issue is, where do the stories appear, who sees them?
JP: Turning the investigations into a DVD, as opposed to making them in print or strictly have them online, has extended our reach. People are able to share the DVD in their community, they buy the DVD to use in their libraries, other people are buying 100 DVDs just to distribute at meetings, and that type of thing. That’s far greater and far stronger than the majority of the big newspapers you see.
100R: You guys are ahead of the curve in terms of identifying your space in two respects. One vertical, which is geographically rooted (in) specific areas of interest for people who really care passionately — especially if it is their house, where they are getting bad drinking water. But also, creating new ways to tell stories that nobody has been trying. You’ve taken away the constraints of . . . the “traditional mode.”
JP: When I was getting ready to figure out how do I want to be part of the publishing world, it became very clear that documentaries, especially documentaries about big corporations, are an important topic about corporate control in America. That fantastic documentary done by Jen Abbott (The Corporation) disseminated a very difficult issue. And I remember watching it and thinking this is the best way to be telling stories at this time.
I was in Ohio at that time and people reached out to me about the issue of fuel gas in Pennsylvania. I came to see it and asked to meet a local reporter, who happened to be Melissa, and she had an amazing network of sources, and extremely good writing style, and was really hungry to tell more stories. We were able to start a film from there.
100R: When you were making this film, were there certain moments when you looked into it and said: “Wow, this is something I would never have captured on paper?”
MT: Our first interview for the film was with a landowner whose neighbor had put a fracking site right on the property. It was a site 700 feet from Jim Parkins’ back door and there is no way to convey on paper how that sounded, what it smelled like, what it looked like at night. You can take a photo but … to hear the sound and Jim’s voice as he’s describing what it’s like — it is something words just can’t capture.
100Reporters: Once you make the big fracking documentary for Pennsylvania, what do you do for Act 2 if you are very focused on (fracking) as an issue?
JP: We recognize that when we were covering fracking we were also covering health, we were covering business. So what ended up happening with Public Herald is we stripped down the idea of the traditional way of doing a business section, an economy section, health section, environmental section. Now we are just focusing on how the threads of our stories are connecting and where that is taking us to try to publish in a different place. So the next project we are working on that is connected to Triple Divide is called Invisible Hand. What that showcases is how the public is handling the external costs from the free market within a democracy, and what that looks like on the community level. We are not simply filming an issue that is strictly fracking. We are filming an issue of survival democracy, corporate rights versus personal rights; we are filming the issue of transparency, of freedom of the press.
100R: It seems like fracking is the way in for you — what you are seeing becomes a window into the erosion of democracy around corporate interest, which is involved with race and income inequality, and is becoming the story of our times.
JP: I think that’s what we are witnessing. We’re trying to recognize that and showcase it in the new work we are doing. Journalism has gotten a lot simpler in some ways. The way you tell stories, it’s more topical; we’ve seen that audiences have been open to sticking with stories if they are parts of series, especially film series.
MT: One of the problems I was running into as a newspaper reporter, I was expected to write a story and move on. I love right now I get to stay with a story still if it is continuing. We published the film, and we never stopped — more information, more craziness has surfaced. It is transitioning into this bigger picture, which is the Invisible Hand, which also covers water privatization, among other things.