Basetrack: One-Eight is a Knight News Challenge–winning media experiment that follows 1/8 – 1st Battalion, Eighth Marines, throughout their entire deployment in Afghanistan’s war-torn southern deserts. After working in the region for a decade I joined a small team of embedded mobile media operators transmitting reports and reflections from the battalion’s area of operations. Basetrack connected over a thousand Marines and Corpsmen to their families as well as the broader public to the longest war in US history. This project aimed not only to create a media platform built specifically to support and facilitate independent journalism but also to set a trend by showing alternative ways to mainstream commercial media.
