Spot news, multimedia storytelling: From a too familiar scene, ‘something different’

A man is shot and killed on an East Baltimore street corner late on a Friday afternoon. From police, further information is not immediately available. That’s the story, the too familiar story. The brief, as sad as it is to say, nearly writes itself.

But not if you don’t let it. Not if, even at the end of your shift, at the end of your week, after having just returned from another scene, you go there. Not if you go there with an open mind — and a smartphone.

If you do, you might just get what reporter Justin Fenton offered to his Twitter followers as “something different, and, I’d offer, something more.

Staubs, wearing a black dress shirt and a black-and-red tie, says he once regularly traveled from West Virginia to Baltimore to score drugs. Six years ago, he says, he was saved by God and got clean. He now makes the same trek to spread the Gospel.