How We Go Back To School

About the project

The Coronavirus Spring led to an unprecedented amount of school closures across the U.S. At Education Week, we decided early on that we needed to provide a framework of options and best practices to help school and district leaders make informed decisions for their community.

My role

The Coronavirus Spring led to an unprecedented amount of school closures across the U.S. At Education Week, we decided early on that we needed to provide a framework of options and best practices to help school and district leaders make informed decisions for their community.

As the digital and visual project editor for this 8-part series, my role was to create the framework for the series, develop a style guide and drive how the stories would be told. Each segment was structured with a landing page that utilized strong visual elements with distillations of text. The goal is that a user could come to this page and get all the basic information they need - something that is important to our busy school/district leader audience. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for schools, so we added deeper dives and other supplementary material so the user could choose which segments they wanted to consume. We also ensured the in-article experience was optimal by creating a lot of link-backs to other content, custom visualizations but also re-using elements from the landing page since so much of our traffic goes through a back door. The stories stray from the traditional narrative style and take a more explainer-like approach to make the information as accessible as possible.

I created a stark color palette to reflect the seriousness of the content - utilizing our brand standards, but leaning into some of our deeper tones. All of the graphic elements for the series are custom made by my-self and the rest of the design team, often visualizing concepts that have no visual reference material.

During the project, I worked in coordination with our revenue teams to deploy the series in a new template that was mobile-friendly and allowed for monetization. In addition, we were able to create new, sell-able products associated with this series, including a series of webinars, that have had significant impact on our revenue earnings. The series has been very popular among our audience groups and has been the most successful project in driving registrations and subscriptions.

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Dismissed: Tenants Lose, Landlords Win in Baltimore's Rent Court

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Sun Investigates team members Doug Donovan and Jean Marbella spent a year examining Baltimore’s court system for landlord-tenant disputes. They spent dozens of hours observing court proceedings and touring tenants’ homes, interviewed dozens of tenants, landlords, officials, and analysts, and reviewed thousands of pages of court filings and other documents.

MY ROLE

Visuals Journalist & Editor, 360 Video Producer
In this project, I photographed and shot video of several subjects and locations, served as the main producer for the video elements and produced The Sun’s first ever 360 video story. As visuals editor for the project, I was responsible for the presentation of visual elements online and in the paper.

Baltimore leaders created the nation’s first housing court seventy years ago in response to the slum conditions spreading in the city. Rent court was supposed to foster safer, cleaner and better housing in Baltimore. However, a yearlong investigation by The Baltimore Sun found that the system routinely works against tenants, while in many cases failing to hold landlords accountable for not meeting minimum housing standards.

Made possible by a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network, we were able to purchase the necessary equipment and software to create a 360 video. I wanted to show the real impacts of the rent court system by taking the user on a tour of a house with multiple code violations. This tenant had been trying unsuccessfully to get the landlord to fix the issues, but faced difficulty when in court. As the user enters each room, they can “move” around and graphics will highlight the various code violations. Each scene is also narrated with descriptions of the violations to encourage the user to utilize the 360 features.

The page utilized the template that I designed during the “Unsettled Journeys” project which allows for integration of rich multimedia and interactive features.

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Bridging the Divide

About the project

At a time when Maryland’s population is growing more diverse, the schools are becoming more segregated. Baltimore Sun reporters Liz Bowie and Erica L. Green examined local attempts to better integrate schools by race and class.

My Role

As the overall visuals editor for the project, I worked closely with Bowie and Green, along with visual journalist Lloyd Fox to craft narrative videos for each installment. We spoke to parents, school leaders, district leaders, combed through school board meetings to tell the story of integration attempts and the overt racism that surfaced during the process in a Baltimore suburb.

The visual presentations integrated video, data, and photo elements that enhances the original, investigative reporting. I worked closed with the development to carefully place each element where they made the most sense and to ensure an optimal user experience.

Even as Baltimore County's population grows more diverse, the schools are becoming more segregated by race and class. In the fall of 2015, with overcrowding at several Catonsville-area schools, the county school board ordered boundary lines redrawn.

Awards

2017, Online Journalism Awards, Finalist

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Korryn Gaines: The 6-Hour Police Standoff

ABOUT THE PROJECT

On the morning of Aug. 1, officers with the Baltimore County Police Department arrived at the Randallstown apartment of Korryn Gaines to serve warrants on her and her fiance, Kareem Courtney. After a standoff that lasted about six hours, Gaines was dead from police gunfire. County prosecutors would rule the shooting justified, and no charges would be filed against officers.

Through a public records request, The Baltimore Sun obtained a trove of evidence in the case. The case file includes officer statements, police radio chatter, and crime scene photographs, as well as videos and audio recordings taken by Gaines during the standoff.

MY ROLE

As the multimedia editor for the project, I combed through the entire case file identifying key pieces of evidence including crime scene photos, police audio communications, and other documents to piece together the timeline of the standoff. Working with the interactives team, we compiled all the individual components together in a slide based format so users could see the evidence that correlated to important time pegs.

AWARDS

2016 Society of News Design, Single Subject Story, Finalist

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Shoot to Kill

ABOUT THE PROJECT

In Baltimore, one of every three people struck by gunfire dies. It ranks as one of the most lethal of America’s largest cities, according to a Baltimore Sun analysis. Reporter Justin George undertook a yearlong investigation into this rarely studied phenomenon, documenting patterns of lethality based on hundreds of crime statistics, hospital data and gun trace reports as well as interviews.

MY ROLE

Visuals Editor & Audio Producer
In my role as the enterprise visuals editor for the project, I worked closed with George throughout his fellowship at Marquette University to gather interviews with victims of gun violence and police chiefs across the United States. I worked with visuals journalists Lloyd Fox and Karl Merton Ferron to photograph victims of gun violence in Baltimore, gain access to Shock Trauma for documentary photo and video purposes and get interviews with homicide detectives, criminologists, medical experts, and community activists.

Based on all these materials, I edited together a narrative video piece about the overall trend as well as several supplementary audio pieces to integrate within the overall visual presentation. Also, in order to create an impactful print design, I art directed a conceptual photo shoot in a controlled gun range with Fox to get the image of the gun being fired.

In Baltimore, one of every three people struck by gunfire dies. That means it ranks as the most lethal of America’s largest cities, according to a Baltimore Sun analysis. (Baltimore Sun video) > Read the full story: http://data.baltimoresun.com/news/shoot-to-kill/

Awards

2017 Online Journalism Awards, Finalist

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