Monica Mercer
Monica Mercer started reporting on how philanthropy has changed (page 55) months ago by having informal conversations with people connected to the community and getting their thoughts on what it means to give. “I’d noticed for my three years here that Detroiters are extremely generous, but my sense was that it wasn’t about money, and a lot of people felt the same way,” she says. An associate editor for Hour Detroit, Mercer traveled to Kenya with a local medical team earlier in the fall to report on the need for and challenges of donating medical care in sub-Saharan Africa.
Eli DiSante Hoerler
Hoerler studies journalism and Arabic at Wayne State University and has been an intern at Hour Detroit since September. Hoerler gravitated to journalism as an outlet for curiosity and loves hearing and telling stories. For this issue, he was overjoyed to explore the expansion of the craft distilling movement (page 63) in Detroit, one more way Detroiters are building their own renaissance. “There is no better city to be documenting right now,” he says. “Detroit is the juiciest story in the whole country.” Needless to say, Hoerler — now in his senior year — doesn’t see himself leaving this city for a long time.
Justin Maconochie
Holiday Nights at Greenfield Village (page 78) posed some challenges for Justin Maconochie, a regular contributor to Hour Detroit and Detroit Home magazines. “How do you capture the ambiance of scenes lit by candles and fire?” he says. “I had to channel my favorite director, Stanley Kubrick.” In Barry Lyndon, Kubrick used modified lenses that were developed by NASA to shoot scenes lit completely by candlelight to capture lighting in the 18th century. “Luckily, I didn’t have to invent any special cameras, but the film inspired the photographs I took that night,” Maconochie says. “With the help of modern camera technology, the mood of the evening was maintained.”
Martina Guzmán
Throughout her career in journalism, Guzmán has enjoyed reporting on popular culture. As a Mexican-American born and raised in Southwest Detroit, the producer/reporter for Wayne State University’s WDET has retained her love of the cultural phenomenon that is the telenovela, better known in the United States as the soap opera. In her story on the thriving Detroit Opera House (page 49), Guzmán combines her fascination of the soap opera with an appreciation for the dramatic arts. “While covering this assignment, I discovered that the drama in opera is identical to a telenovela, but with better costumes and music,” she says.
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