From “news for kids” to breaking news and features,
to research and academic work.
I have work experience in the United States and internationally at The New York Times, Le Monde, and ABC News. My efforts to expand my technical skills led me Stanford University and my current position at a Stanford research center dedicated to studying the North American West, in a role that straddles journalism, research, and teaching.
I am also available for consulting, presentation, and training opportunities. I invite you to contact me at the email and phone number listed below.
- I started my career at ABCNews.com in 1999 as an infographics journalist, where I worked on breaking news stories, investigative features, and explanatory stories; I helped launch ABCNews4Kids, a comics-based news site hosted on Disney.com that was geared towards 8-12 years old “tweens.”
- In 2000, I became the first online Graphics Editor for The New York Times. I was tasked with interpreting the paper’s renowned print infographics work for a digital, interactive medium;
- Over time, I worked on major breaking news stories from the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections to the September 11 attacks, the Afghan and Iraq wars, the Indian ocean tsunami and the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster;
- As Enterprise Editor, I was responsible for establishing and running the Times’s multimedia desk, creating original projects, and planning major investigations and feature stories with the newspaper’s desk heads;
- As Chief Multimedia Producer, I did original audio and photo-based field reporting, and created templates and a content management system, Configurator, for members of the whole web newsroom to create multimedia stories;
- I also spent 18 months as a Video Journalist with Times Video, where I used professional cameras and audio gear to shoot, write, and edit stories for the New York Times website and broadcast partners;
- At Le Monde, I created interactive multimedia features for a French-language audience that explored topics from the 40th anniversary of the May 1968 demonstrations to the US presidential elections of 2008, as well as tools for newsroom staff to create maps and charts;
- In 2009, I began a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University to deepen my skills in data visualization, statistical analysis, and geographic information systems; during my time at Stanford, I produced the widely-cited documentary “Journalism in the Age of Data,” about the growing role that data journalism and visualization were playing in reporting and news presentation;
- In 2010, collaborations that I was undertaking with Stanford researchers evolved into a role with the Bill Lane Center for the American West, a research organization founded by the historians David M. Kennedy and Richard White;
- Since then, I’ve been working at the nexus of academic research and original journalism; I’ve had the chance to produce interactive documentary features like An Unquiet Landscape: the New American Energy Frontier with the late John McChesney, the veteran NPR journalist; explorations of western history with Harper’s Magazine; and environmental stories like “Envisioning California’s Delta as it Was” with KQED Public Media, and “Understanding California’s Groundwater” with our partners at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
- Lastly, I’ve been working for two years with my former New York Times colleague, Felicity Barringer, on our “...& the West” blog, which examines western environmental and public health issues, and makes heavy use of infographics and maps.
- In 2015 and 16, I was the lead writer for National Geographic’s Data Points blog on data visualization and maps, where I wrote about such subjects as manipulative maps, data and citizen science, demystifying data visualization, and environmental visualization, the last of which explored my work creating live data trackers on wildfires, snowpack, and drought, among others.