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Interactive Storytelling

• NPR's 2020 Election Coverage

  2020's elections were not like any before. NPR covered primaries for the first time, which meant building a completely new rig for the data pipeline and displays (I wrote about its development on the team blog). I also led the rebuild of our general elections tech using the primary pipeline as a starting point and adding Preact for a single-page app on the front-end. Our results were among the fastest in the country, and we also took care to address concerns around voting by mail, misinformation about results, and the role of the electoral college. Developer Ruth Talbot wrote more about that in a retrospective blog post.

  

• NPR Book Concierge

  Started in 2013, the NPR Book Concierge has become a well-loved tradition. For 2019, I rewrote the architecture of the app in order to support the full archives — more than 2,000 books — in a single, flexible page. Read more about how I did it on the NPR News Apps blog.

  

• White Lies

  A premiere history and true-crime podcast from NPR, I worked with a multidisciplinary team to create the newsroom's first scrolling experience. With this interactive page, we hoped to intrigue listeners, but also create a resource that they could return to throughout the season. More details on how we wrangled audio and video for the story on the team blog.

  

• After the Water

  The floods that overtook downtown Ellicott City, Maryland, are a vivid demonstration of not only climate change's physical effects, but also the political and emotional struggles. Drawing on images and reporting from Ryan Kellman and Becky Hersher, I helped organize and build this scrolling experience, including a compelling presentation of security cam footage from the flood. More details from the development are available here.

  

• Plastics: What's Recycled and What Becomes Trash

  Working with the NPR Science Desk, we built this guide to the confusing world of plastics recycling. Each category includes typical items from the store and instructions on what to do for maximum impact, followed by a tour of a recycling facility to bring the full journey to our readers.

  

• Dailygraphics Next

  The Dailygraphics rig at NPR is a long-standing tool for creating dataviz from Google Sheets and D3. Originally based on Python, this project was a from-scratch rewrite in Node that preserved the workflow of the tool, but modernized its UI, JavaScript build process, and cross-platform support. It's used by stations and newsrooms across the country.

  

• The Profanity Peak wolves

  Not only did they have one of the great trivia team names of all time, the Profanity Peak wolves were part of a Washington success story: wolves have mounted a successful comeback since being hunted almost to extension in the 1900's. But the story doesn't end so well for this pack—in this story, reported by Lynda V. Mapes, I downloaded DEM files, reverse-engineered reports from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, and built a hand-rolled WebGL renderer to bring readers into the wolves' territory. A fuller write-up of my process is available on the Seattle Times developer blog.

  

• Sound Transit 3 Guide

  In anticipation of the vote for Seattle's ST3 transit initiative, we published this in-depth guide to what the package included, and how funds would be allocated. This project served as an opportunity to polish many of our in-house libraries for working with SVG, including the ability to easily move the "camera" by manipulating the SVG viewbox. Based on this experience, our graphics team was able to greatly improve the process of bringing print graphics to life on the web.

  

• Elwha: Roaring back to life

  Since the largest dam removal project in the world, the Elwha has experienced a resurgence, with plants and animals returning to the river. I worked with Lynda Mapes and our graphics department to tell the story online in a way that was evocative and beautiful. More details are available at our dev blog.

  

• Touring Chambers Bay

  The site of the US Open in 2015, Chambers Bay is not a typical American golf course. To demonstrate its steep verticality and unconventional hazards, I loaded the course architect's CAD file into Three.js and created this interactive tour, including hole-by-hole descriptions and video.

  

• The Mobile Home Trap

  For this investigative series, the Seattle Times examined the shady business practices of the Warren Buffett-owned Clayton Homes. This particular piece detailed how proposed legislation would largely exempt Clayton's loans from regulations. For my interactive, I tried to highlight the effects of that change on the market, and show how the law would barely affect other mobile home vendors.