Just came off four busy days covering the efforts to rescue six trapped miners in the Crandall Canyon coal mine outside of Huntington, Utah. I’m thoroughly exhausted, and can only imagine how the rescue teams who have been working nonstop for nearly a week feel.

A lot more to say and photographs to show about the story, and it’s still unresolved. Let’s hope those guys are okay, that there’s a miracle. It seems that in the coverage it’s easy to forget the six men at the center of it.

I did two multimedia pieces on the story last week. Click the links below or click the photos to watch the pieces.

This week, The Moving Wall, a half-size replica of the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial (with its 58,000+ names) was on display in Provo. We decided to pull another multimedia daily out of it. You can click the photo above to watch it.

I talked to (and recorded) a few veterans before realizing that the audio was unusable. I shouldn’t have expected these men to recount their stories of war and loss to a stranger with a recorder. They did their best. One man told me about his best friend who died in Vietnam. He then thanked me and walked off in tears.

Gerald Hubbard, a volunteer at the site, told me his story of healing at the wall. I boiled down that interview into a short multimedia piece.

Here is the link: http://extras.sltrib.com/not_in_print/themovingwall/index.html

What’s it now, a month ago that I covered the release of Apple’s iPhone?

I put together a multimedia piece on the event, trying to capture the fun insanity of the Apple fanboys and girls. It was done on deadline, and not the newspaper’s deadline. A much tighter deadline: It was my anniversary and my wife was waiting for me at the restaurant. I would much rather keep an editor waiting than my wife.

The point of this post isn’t everything I’ve just said. It’s really about multimedia and the creative process. The package I put together on deadline had some cool ideas, but over the past four weeks I kept thinking about it, knowing I didn’t achieve everything I’d wanted out of it.

I started working on version 2.0, and I’m going to give you links to both versions. The second one is a huge improvement, though I’ll admit that as soon as I’d finished it I realized that there were still obvious changes that needed to be made. But I’m letting it go. I mean, how often to I go back and re-shoot an assignment from last month because I got an idea of how to do it better? Actually, never.

Here’s the first version that was posted 90 minutes after the event: http://166.70.44.68/multimedia/iphone/

And here is version 2.0. If you’re only going to watch one, this is it (click on the image below):

Tour of Hatred. A tour through lands of hatred, intolerance, and death. Bosnia, Kosovo, Poland. (older content, 2000)