Covering business in Haiti after the earthquake

National Public Radio business reporter Adam Davidson went to Haiti recently to report, and he talked about his experience with Andrea Pitzer of the Neiman Storyboard.

Here is an excerpt:

You ended up doing a piece on the tap-tap buses and small businesses in a tent city. How did you find those stories?

I had been to Haiti a few weeks before. The tap-taps are ubiquitous, and I found them fascinating. I was puzzled — Haiti is genuinely a desperately poor country. Most of my reporting was about how every person, every business, the government — everybody in Haiti, more so than every country I’ve been in before — is cutting costs down to a real bare-bones subsistence level.

And then you see these buses that are so expensively and elaborately painted. And I was like, “How can that be happening?” I loved them and thought they were so beautiful.  I’ve been in the Middle East, other places where you see painted trucks and painted buses, but I’ve never seen them so cool and awesome.

But I’m a hard-hearted economics reporter, so I never believe that people do anything, especially in very poor countries, just for art’s sake — especially very expensive art. I genuinely had a puzzle I wanted to understand. We also had the question of “if we’re going to work with Frontline, what’s a visual story?” That struck me as such a visual story.

And then “The Economy of a Tent City” — I was driving around Port-au-Prince, seeing these tent cities all over. Most of my work right then was not focused on life there, but I noticed an Internet café in a tent, and I thought “Wow. What’s going on with that?” I thought they must be developing such complicated economies. I think many of the best stories come from wandering around a city and wondering what the hell is going on.

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