PBS “FRONTLINE,” the nation’s longest running documentary program, has produced more than 800 documentaries since it began in 1983. Over the past several years, it has embarked on an initiative led by Editor-in-Chief and Executive Producer Raney Aronson-Rath to open up its archive and make many of those documentaries available to the public on its YouTube channel, which it recently announced had over 1 billion views.
As part of the initiative, this summer, FRONTLINE began re-releasing a selection of episodes of “FRONTLINE/World: Stories from a Small Planet,” a one-hour news magazine format series (3 stories in an hour) that turned its lens on the global community, covering countries and cultures rarely seen on American television. Produced in association with UC Berkeley Journalism, the series, featuring first-person correspondents, many of them students or recent graduates, aired in FRONTLINE’s national timeslot 3-5 times each season from 2002-2010.
“It’s remarkable to see these important docs given new life and reach by FRONTLINE,” Michael D. Bolden, dean of UC Berkeley Journalism said. “So many of the alumni who were given the opportunity to work on them have gone on to make significant contributions to the industry. We appreciate this latest effort by FRONTLINE and will do our part to amplify this work to new audiences.”
A new audience for deeply reported stories
Eight episodes have been published on YouTube so far, seven of them produced with Berkeley Journalism, and more will be released in the coming months:
“Bhutan: The Last Place,” produced originally as a thesis documentary by Alexis Bloom (’01) and Tshewang Dendup (’01) explores the differing reactions to the advent of cable TV in Bhutan, a Buddhist kingdom that had remained isolated in the Himalayan mountains for centuries and became the last country in the world to legalize TV. The film was re-edited as a story for the premier episode of FRONTLINE/World with camera/sound by Clarence Ting (’01).
Alexis Bloom (’01) filming in Bhutan.
July 26, 2026 Facebook post from PBS and story promoting the episode being available for the first time on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel.
“A Champion Distance Runner’s Quest in Kenya | Run, Lornah, Run” produced and reported by Alexis Bloom (’01) and Cassandra Herrman (’01).
Lornah Kiplagat emerged from the highlands of northwest Kenya as one of the best female runners in the world in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She took her prize money from competitions to establish a unique camp for female athletes, what was then the first women’s running camp in the country, and learned about how they were breaking social expectations in a country that largely prescribed traditional, domestic roles for women.
In the two decades since “Run, Lornah, Run” aired, Kiplagat’s camp, the High Altitude Training Center, has become a destination for elite runners — both female and male — from around the world.
Mary Spicuzza and Claudine LoMonaco, filming in Arizona.
“Mexico: A Death in the Desert,” produced by Claudine LoMonaco (‘04) and Mary Spicuzza (‘04) in Professor Bob Calo’s TV reporting class, and filmed by students Brent McDonald (’04), Andrés Cediel (’04) and Dan Krauss (’04). Re-edited with LoMonaco and Spicuzza as a FRONTLINE/World story.
Like many men from Oaxaca, Mexico, Matias Juan Garcia Zavaleta crossed the U.S.-Mexico border regularly each spring to work in California during harvest time and returned in the fall. He used his earnings to build a home and take care of his family. After years of annual crossings, Garcia had had enough of leaving his family, so he planted his own chili pepper crop. But when an early frost destroyed his plants, he was left with no choice but to cross again in the spring of 2003. This time, the crossing turned fatal.
The show was awarded a citation in the 2005 Overseas Press Club Awards for best international reporting in a broadcast covering human rights.
Continuing lecturer Mark Schapiro’s “Spain: The Lawless Sea,” co-produced with the Center for Investigative Reporting, examined how an aging tanker caused one of Europe’s worst environmental disasters — and what it revealed about lack of accountability in the maritime system. The producer was Oriana Zill de Granados, who worked as a writer|producer for FRONTLINE out of the IRP offices, and is a graduate of UC Berkeley (BS in Political Science and Government ’89). Camille Servan-Schreiber (’98) was the co-producer and videographer.
Mark Schapiro interviews volunteers about the oil spill clean up efforts.
The documentary won Third Place in the Outstanding In-Depth Reporting — Television category in the Society of Environmental Journalists Awards. The judges called it “an example of great reporting about a story of international importance. Schapiro and his crew hacked away at the thick bureaucracy that shields public attention and understanding about maritime disasters.”
“Vietnam: Looking For Home,” reported by Nguyen Qui Duc and produced and filmed by Camille Servan-Schreiber (’98), is a first-hand account, decades after the Vietnam War, that shattered Qui Duc’s childhood. He traveled back to his homeland to document the changes he witnessed in the country.
Cassandra Herrman (’01) filming “Tanzania: Hero Rats.”
“Tanzania: Hero Rats,” produced and reported by Alexis Bloom (’01) and Cassandra Herrman (’01). FRONTLINE/World reporters accompany Bart Weetjens, who founded a unique lab in Tanzania dedicated to training rats to sniff out deadly unexploded land mines — the legacy of countless bloody conflicts — to neighboring Mozambique, in order to watch his organization’s trained rodents in action.
Bart Weetjens with reporter Alexis Bloom (’01).
“Inside the Fight Against SARS | Hong Kong: Chasing the Virus”
Interns Dan Krauss (’04) and Brent McDonald (’04)
The COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t the first time the world experienced an outbreak of a never-before-seen type of coronavirus. In the FRONTLINE/World short documentary “Hong Kong: Chasing the Virus,” which aired in June 2003, reporter and producer Renata Simone went inside an earlier outbreak of a coronavirus that also originated in mainland China: SARS. It spread to the rest of the world after a man from China’s Guangdong province attended a wedding in Hong Kong and unknowingly infected nine other guests at the hotel where he was staying.
As the sense of urgency mounted, Simone filmed with an international group of researchers who were teaming up at the University of Hong Kong to try to combat SARS, following their efforts to find a cure.
The Backstory
Steve Talbot, a long-time documentary filmmaker, waxed poetic about the series: “In its day it was quite innovative and very successful, winning Emmys, Webbys [for our website], and other awards and creating some very memorable stories,” Talbot said.
Talbot taught at the J-School from 2004-2008 (and returned in 2011-2012) as part of a unique deal worked out between FRONTLINE’s Founder and then-Executive Producer David Fanning and Dean Orville Schell to expand FRONTLINE into an international newsmagazine.
Steve Talbot
Fanning recruited Sharon Tiller, a veteran producer and Professor Lowell Bergman’s wife, and Talbot to manage the series and recruit and mentor young journalists to work on the FRONTLINE/World website and broadcast.
At first, their West Coast office was based at KQED, another early partner in the series. But from 2004 onward, FRONTLINE/World was based inside the J-School and then across the street in its Investigative Reporting Program offices shared with Bergman and his growing team, where staff editor David Ritsher set up the edit suites. The mothership remained the FRONTLINE headquarters at WGBH in Boston where Talbot and Tiller went to oversee the final assembly and post-production of the 30+ episodes aired. Read an SFGate story about the series here.
“Quite a few of the FRONTLINE/World stories were produced and reported by J-School students or recent alums,” Talbot explained. “For many, it was the start of their careers in broadcast journalism and documentary filmmaking.”
Unfortunately, once the series run came to an end over funding issues, FRONTLINE/World stories were left homeless. “Our once dynamic website went dormant,” Talbot said. ”The videos we posted on the site disappeared. So, I’m incredibly pleased that FRONTLINE’s Executive Producer Raney Aronson decided to revive some of our best pieces on the very successful FRONTLINE YouTube Channel.”
Much of the work would go on to win awards, following rave reviews
Be assured it’s not your father’s FRONTLINE. The journalists are younger, sometimes students. The photography is more incidental, often employing go-anywhere digital cameras. The target audience is clearly younger than that for, say, Meet the Press. … [I]t opens a window on a world little known to American audiences. If that is the legacy of the new FRONTLINE/World, it will be a meaningful one.
— Seattle Post-Intelligencer
FRONTLINE/World: Stories from a Small Planet is the most traveling you can do without leaving your house. This fascinating, irregular spin-off of “FRONTLINE” airs tonight and next Thursday at 9 p.m. on Channel 13. Its subtitle, “Stories from a Small Planet,” describes not just the program’s content, but its mood. Intelligent, complicated and often dryly funny, it often suggests what might happen if “60 Minutes” and the public radio series “This American Life” had a baby, then turned it loose to travel the globe.
–The Star Ledger
The editor’s pick of the night is a new venture by arguably the best new show on the air today: It’s FRONTLINE/World … . As we’ve said many times before, FRONTLINE is the benchmark of excellence for news documentaries, so when it launches a unique newsmagazine, we think that’s a show definitely worth watching.
— TV Guide
Earning industry accolades from the jump
FRONTLINE/World’s debut episode “Gunrunners,” a documentary about the illegal small arms trade in West Africa produced produced and reported by the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Rick Young and William “Rocky” Kistner, won the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) Award for online coverage. Nearly all the students in Professor Lowell Bergman’s investigative reporting seminar provided reporting for the website: Allyce Bess, Dave Gilson, Monica Sagullo, James Sandler, Mabel Tampinco, Robin Stein, Kelly Davis and Jared Saylor along with freelance investigative reporters Julie Reynolds and Marlena Telvick, who attended and assisted running the seminar. Read how the investigation helped prosecutors in the arrest of Charles Taylor, the former warlord and dictator of Liberia and others here.
Lowell Bergman, founder of the Investigative Reporting Program where FRONTLINE/World was based from 2004-2010 and who worked on some of the series’ episodes, teaching his investigative journalism course at UC Berkeley Journalism. Photo: Craig Lee/San Francisco Chronicle.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented its 33rd Annual Student Academy Awards on Saturday, June 10, 2006 in Beverly Hills. Pictured here are all of this year’s winners. Front row (left to right): Carrie Lozano, Tristan Holmes, Meng Vue, Xiaoli Zhou, Cady Abarca-Benevidas, Chris Choy. Back row (left to right): Thomas Leavitt, Mak Hossain, Travis Hatfield, Samuel Day, Jennifer Handorf, Moon Molson, Sean Overbeeke, Carmen Vidal Balanzat. Photo courtesy of the Academy.
Xiaoli Zhou (’05) won a silver medal in the documentary category of 2006 Student Academy Awards for “The Women’s Kingdom,” about keepers of one of the last matriarchal societies in the world in a remote area of southwest China that premiered as a FRONTLINE/WORLD Rough Cut video. Produced with Brent Huffman and Sachi Cunningham (both ‘05).
Xiaoli Zhou and Brent Huffman pose with Zum Kang Tashe, also referred to as the Rinpoche, a direct descendant of the seventh Dalai Lama.. Xiaoli and Brent fell in love working on this project as Berkeley students and have now been married for 21 years and have two children together.
Sasha Khokha’s (’04) cinema verite thesis film “Calcutta Calling,” documenting the lives of teenage girls adopted from India to Swedish-Lutheran Minnesota was nominated for a national broadcast Emmy in 2007. In a promo for the film, Talbot was generous in his estimation of it: “There is nothing pretentious or heavy-handed about this film. Not a single false note. That’s a tribute to the young filmmaker’s skill and honesty as well as a reflection of her own sensitivity to the nuances of dual identities and mixed backgrounds.”
Amy Costello and Cassandra Herrman in Darfur. Oct/Nov 2004
Cassandra Herrman’s (’01) report on the Sudanese government’s campaign of terror in Darfur, “Sudan: The Quick and the Terrible” was nominated for Outstanding Feature Story in a News Magazine in the 2006 News and Documentary Emmy Awards. For nearly a decade, Herrman was a cinematographer and producer for FRONTLINE/World, filming across the African continent, the Middle East, Latin America, and China.
FRONTLINE/World won three Emmys, the Overseas Press Club Edward R. Murrow Award and its cutting-edge website received two Webby Awards for best online documentary series and best news and politics series.
–By Marlena Telvick, former deputy director of the IRP
