Instructors Team Up to Write for the BBC

Bo Taylor was murdered in 1984, shot by a man who had ripped him off in a drug deal. That man is Ronnie Fields. For the next two decades, Taylor’s sister Denise and her father struggled with the loss of Bo, and in 2005, Denise made the unlikely decision to contact Fields. She wrote him a letter, and thus began the decade-long journey to get her brother’s killer out of prison.

Katya Cengel, journalist and lecturer
at Cal Poly, has pieces published
by BBC, The Washington Post, and
The Wall Street Journal. Cengel
teaches the JOUR 203 course.

 

 

Flash forward to December 2016, when writer and Cal Poly journalism instructor Katya Cengel met Denise Taylor and began to follow the story of Fields’ path to parole. She pitched the story to the BBC, but they expressed particular interest in telling the story using multimedia.

Cengel, primarily a print journalist, shared an office with broadcast journalist and fellow instructor Keli Moore at the time.

“We were talking about both of our skill sets and how we could collaborate on future projects,” Moore recalls, “and then she said, 'Let me think about if there’s anything I’m working on that we could collaborate on.' Then all of the sudden, boom, she had this story in the works.”

The two started their collaboration in April, working through September to capture the story of the Taylor family, Ronnie Fields, and their unlikely alliance.

Before becoming an adjunct professor
at Cal Poly, journalist Keli Moore
anchored the Daybreak show
on KSBY (NBC) with journalism
professor Richard Gearhart.

 

On the morning of April 16, the day of Fields’ release, Cengel and Moore arrived at the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad. They were turned away by the guard, who asserted that they were not permitted on the property.

“So we nonchalantly made a ‘very long U-turn’ on the property, taking a few photos out of the window, which resulted in us getting our car searched and all of our footage taken away,” Moore says. “I actually had my camera out of the window on the property and that’s not allowed… prisons are pretty particular.”

Following the incident, the two had to get creative. They lingered by the local bus stop, waiting hours for Fields to arrive. When he did, Moore hopped on the bus with Fields, interviewing him and filming his first moments of freedom after 35 years of incarceration.

Over the next several months, Moore and Cengel spent hours, even days, with Fields and the Taylor family, interviewing, filming and observing. Cengel recalls the day the group visited the crime scene in Compton.

The unlikely friendship between Taylor and Fields
made for a compelling story, captured by Cengel and Moore.

 

 

Fields had grown up in that neighborhood, a neighborhood riddled with gangs and drug addicts, the neighborhood where he took Bo’s life. But after a three-decades-long incarceration, Fields may be on a new path.  
“He’s seen that pain firsthand of Denise and her father, and that reminder is there, keeping him on a straighter path,” Cengel says.

The story, “My Brother’s Killer is Now My Friend,” was published by the BBC on September 8, garnering just under a million hits within the first 48 hours of publication.

Cengel and Moore are moving forward to new projects with hopes of collaborating again in the near future. Both insist that continuing their careers as journalists, in addition to journalism instructors, is vital to their relevance and their understanding of the industry.