Portfolio
Crypto real estate: the property market built on digital assets
I pitched, reported and wrote this feature story about people buying physical property with digital assets. In my reporting, I focused on bringing examples of crypto-based sales and crypto regulation of the property market from around the globe. While working on the story, the crypto market crashed, and I re-reported and re-wrote parts of the story to reflect the very quickly changing nature of the crypto property market.
Coronavirus tracked
The Financial Times has been tracking the coronavirus pandemic since the end of January. We created a series of trackers looking at the trajectory of cases and deaths as well as trackers showing economic impact and goverment responses. I managed the early coverage of the crisis and created a data pipeline for these ongoing trackers, which has been used in much of the data-driven coverage of the pandemic.
The garden maze and the meaning of life
In the FT's first interactive project of this kind involving 360-images, we storyboarded, shot and built an immersive experience featuring world-renowned maze designer Adrian Fisher's personal maze at his home in England. I planned shots ahead of time, brought together a team of developers, designer and videographer, directed shots on the day and helped build the story.
How MPs voted on Brexit
MPs voted on a series of Brexit issues in the beginning of 2019. We created composable interactive templates and graphics to quickly analyse how MPs voted and provide context on how their votes changed between votes. These were used in six key votes throughout the year, and the data fed into our UK general election coverage in December 2019.
The Uber Game
This news game based on real reporting chronicled the challenges of being an Uber driver and the types of choices they make throughout the week. I helped develop several of the journeys through the game. This story was shortlisted for and won a number of awards, including the Online Journalism Awards, Society of News Design Awards and Malofiej.
‘Hamilton’ raises Broadway ticket prices to foil scalpers
In an effort to curb ticket scalping, producers for Hamilton raised prime orchestra tickets to $849, a record-breaking number. I analysed Hamilton's secondary ticket volumes on the resale site StubHub and found that the resale of Hamilton tickets dropped nearly 50 per cent after the price change. Secondary ticket sellers posted an average of 53 listings for each Hamilton performance after the price rise, compared with 99 listings before. This was featured on an FT Facebook Live episode.
Pensions and bonds: the problem explained
This graphics-led story explains bond mathematics and the scale of pension deficits. Data shows that as bond yields have fallen, life expectancies have increased and the gap between assets and liabilities has widened, pension deficits are becoming a real problem. To give additional context to the issue, I created an interactive that compares public and private deficits in the US and UK to the market cap of the largest 1500 companies by market cap and country GDPs.
Food Allergies on a Budget
In 2012, 4.1 million children in the U.S. reported having food allergies, and that number is increasing. The same year, the National Health Interview Survey found that over 20 percent of children with food allergies are struggling with food insecurity. This story highlights the challenges that families with food allergies struggle with when buying healthy and safe foods, and how one Kansas City food pantry is hoping to help. I also created an interactive grocery bill calculator to put readers in the shoes of families with food allergies and drive home the real costs that they have to deal with on a daily basis.
Good enough to fight for the US but missing the mark for citizenship
After working on a piece about deported veterans, I took a look into the reasons why some soldiers and veterans were denied citizenship. I filed a FOIA request and received data on more than 4,100 military citizenship application denials.
Deported vets: life in ‘the bunker’
This feature story follows Hector Barajas, a deported Army veteran, and the Deported Veterans Support House that he runs in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico. I reported on this story over the course of several months and traveled down during their move into a new office and living space, which would help them better serve other deported veterans.
Broadway Beats
In my spare time, I create interactive graphics and collect data related to Broadway shows and musical performances. I've mapped out the amount of music in a number of musicals, created interactive explainers of songs like Something Rotten's “A Musical” and mapped out when Broadway shows open. I chronicle my progress and projects on my Broadway Beats blog, curate a Twitter feed (@BroadwayData) and freelance data pieces in my spare time.
123456 and other things that shouldn't be your password
In October, Adobe was hacked and information from nearly 150 million users was leaked. I cleaned and analyzed the 10GB dataset of leaked Adobe information and designed graphics showing the significance of the leak and what could be found within the dataset. I also created a game that demonstrated the ease of guessing unsalted passwords given many password hints. I wrote a blog post on how the story came about and some techniques I used to wrangle the large dataset.
Woman Warrior
For this feature on the Native American Woman Warriors (NAWW), a Native American female veteran color guard, I produced several audio pieces about how one of the outfits relates to healing and an explainer using gifs and audio about how one of their dances help the women heal after returning from war.
Bulger verdict explained
This explainer graphic, which was published minutes after the Bulger verdict was read, allows readers to quickly see the counts of which James 'Whitey' Bulger was convicted guilty. This graphic also provides a deeper dive into each charge — readers can get background on each charge and links to related articles from the Globe's coverage. I conceptualized the idea, designed the page, and compiled information for each charge from previous Globe articles. This graphic is fully responsive.
Where Boston's mayoral candidates stand on the issues
After Mayor Thomas M. Menino announced that he would step down after 20 years as Boston's mayor, twelve candidates stepped up to run for his seat. I designed this guide so users could get a general sense of who the candidates were, compare candidates to one another on key issues, and learn more about their vision for the city in a deep dive Q&A profile page. The guide is fully responsive.
Evidence from the Whitey Bulger trial
I created a custom photo gallery template that displays the photo exhibits from the Whitey Bulger trial. Data for the gallery is pulled out from a Google Doc using Tabletop.js, and each image can be tagged with keywords so that the corpus is easily searchable and categorized.
MIT Remembers Officer Sean A. Collier
After the death of MIT police officer Sean A. Collier, the MIT community recognized and honored his memory in a variety of ways, from placing flowers where he was fatally shot to attending his memorial at MIT the following Wednesday. I, along with two others, quickly created a photo upload and gallery app with a moderation tool to collect photos of the memorials around campus taken by the MIT community. I created the infrastructure for the app and designed the moderation interface.
Under Pressure
I led a team of half a dozen interactive graphics staff at The Tech to analyze data and create a set of interactive graphics for The Tech's special issue on pressure at the Institute. I worked on two graphics (Pressure survey breakdowns and Sleep/Work/Play) for the issue and put together the online package that compiles all of The Tech's coverage. One of the graphics (When are MIT students asleep?) won first place in the interactives category in the 2013 SSND digital news design competition.The project was also a 2013 Online Journalism Awards finalist in the large student projects category.
Religion at MIT
This interactive was created for The Tech's Religion feature. The Tech conducted a survey of the entire student body with more than 2100 responses. This interactive shows the relative percentages of responses across different demographics on campus. I came up with the concept and created and designed the interface for the interactive. On January 4, 2013, I modified the code to use Tabletop.js and open-sourced the code. The code is available on Github.
This interactive was a finalist in data driven applications category of the 2013 Global Editors Network Data Journalism Awards.
Unraveling the Enigma
This feature for The Tech used both text and video to show the preparation and execution of MIT's Mystery Hunt 2013. I worked on parts of the filming and video editing as well as the design for the page. I also worked closely with our news editors during the hunt in planning the way we would present the piece.
Predict the 2012 Presidential Election
I created an app for The Tech's readers that records their predictions for the 2012 presidential election and tracks their accuracy on election day when results are announced.
Cambridge Food Inspections
The City of Cambridge releases part of their food inspections data on their website. This interactive map accompanied an article that I wrote about the way food inspections are conducted in Cambridge, MA. For the interactive, I wrote the web scraper that scrapes data from the City of Cambridge's website and also developed the concept and design of the interactive. This interactive won third place in the interactives category in the 2013 SSND digital news design competition.
White Christmas, or not?
This responsively-designed Christmas app shows 40 years of Christmas weather history for the top 29 largest U.S. cities (plus Fairbanks, AK just for fun). I used the Wunderground API to gather the historical data.
Make me a Menu
This interactive went along with an article from a fellow college correspondent for USA TODAY. This generated random sets of breakfast, lunch, and dinner foods that represented a balanced diet, according to guidelines from the USDA. (Link no longer works)
Breaking down a Non-disclosure Agreement
This interactive went along with a story I wrote for USA TODAY College about non-disclosure agreements. The interactive and article were both created within 12 hours. (Link no longer works)