Narrative and features
What if you could hear climate change? Listen to music based on a century of rainfall data
Climate change is altering rainfall patterns in the United States. I conceived of this presentation using sound to tell the story. Three composers from Full Sail University created original pieces of music using rainfall data from the investigation. I worked with the musicians on the concept and built the audio-playing charts in the story. The charts use Svelte and D3.
Draining the Forests
I built a series of narrative maps in this investigation to help explain how mismanagement of water rights contributes to worsening drought. I worked with editors to design each step in the narrative and built a workflow allowing continuous updates as the story came together. The maps use Mapbox and my own Ulysses-JS framework.
The Last Generation
This is the story of three children growing up in the Marshall Islands, knowing they might be among the last to do so. I developed the overall technical architecture for the project using Svelte, ArchieML and Tarbell. I built an editing workflow (using ArchieML in a GoogleDoc) to manage assets throughout the project and taught reporters to use it. I built about half the interactive slides.
Poisoned Cities, Deadly Border
In designing this experience around a sprawling investigation of pollution on the US-Mexico border, we broke the story into fragments and let readers choose where to start based on how much time they had. I built the overall site architecture in Svelte and designed a mini-CMS using ArchieML.
Inheritance
This is the story of Ken Dornstein making sense of the loss of his brother David, who died in the Lockerbie Bombing in 1988. I helped construct the overall story, built the framework to tell it and implemented most of the final design. The project won an Emmy and Peabody Facebook award.
Connecting users to investigations
How do audiences connect with the data that reporters use? The projects below allow users to see the local impact of national stories, forging a deeper connection with our journalism. All use Svelte and Mapbox to create a fast interface that works seamlessly on mobile and desktop.
These are archived links, because Gannett turned off the platform that supported these stories.
More than 200 U.S. dams have failed in rain storms since 2000. See if your community is at risk
NURSING HOME RATINGS: See how they fared during COVID's winter surge, 2020-21
See how precipitation has changed in your community
Talks and presentations
A Spatial Data Cooking Show
This was a demonstration of a workflow I’ve adopted for analyzing GIS data using Datasette and SpatiaLite, using a suite of open source tools. Source code and additional links are available on Github.
The three kinds of code you write in the newsroom
In this NICAR lightning talk, I explain how there are only three kinds of code we write in newsrooms: Reporting, storytelling and product. We screw ourselves up when we mix up the kind of code we’re writing.
Let's make a plan
Kim Bui and I argue that newsrooms can and should prepare for most news events, and we give practical examples of how to do so.