Welcome to my AWESOME GeoCities Page!
It's the 90s, baby!
Berenice Abbott Project
An icon, Berenice Abbott captured New York in a way few men —and almost no women— had before. I was so intrigued by her work entering the public domain that I wanted to see what had changed since the ’30s. There’s a lot of fun to be had poking through digitized archives from libraries and museums. Library of Congress, American Museum of Natural History, the New York and Brooklyn Public Libraries, you name it. In early 2016, I saw that the NYPL had substantially expanded its digital offerings, opening access to high-resolution scans of the public domain works in its collection. Among them was Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York, a project she persuaded the WPA’s Federal Art Project to fund in 1935. I spent hours combing through her photos, recognizing many of the scenes from my everyday life. Then it hit me: I should rephotograph them, and show people what has changed. I used Google Street View to parse out the best options and printed out copies of Abbott’s photos to bring with me. And over the course of a couple of weeks that spring, I went out and shot the current-day streetscapes. I ended up needing to reshoot a couple of the photos and then devoted a considerable amount of time to lining everything up and adjusting for camera differences. (It had been 80 years, after all.) I also interviewed a number of experts on everything from hand-painted advertisements to anchor plates in old brick buildings, and dug around the archives some more for old atlases before putting it all together. The piece ran online, and our art directors found a way to make it look great in print, too. A kind subscriber even commented that the article justified their subscription for a few more months.
1950 Census Story
The question I most often ask myself when starting on a story is “What’s most useful to readers?” Followed by “How can I use some really cool visuals to make this story even more effective?” I love teaming up with a seasoned reporter on a project. They have the experience, connections and intuition you get from working a beat, and that’s indispensable for someone like me who is pretty good for research, logistics and story flow but maybe less so for the intricacies of, say, census privacy laws. So I guess it’s a good thing the D.C. bureau had me team up with our census reporter. Records from the 1950 census were being released and we wanted to do something fun about how much the country had changed in 72 years (how long, according to those census privacy laws, the National Archives has to wait to release individual records.) We put together a storyboard of all the things happening in 1950 and some of the most important takeaways readers might find interesting. I compiled a list of celebrities whose first census appearance would be there — people like Dionne Warwick, Martha Stewart and Anthony Fauci. In the Denver Post archives, I found a photo of a family being interviewed and thought maybe I could see if any of them were around and willing to be interviewed. I was in luck. Naomi DiBona was 1 year old in that photo, and now, here in 2022, she was an absolutely lovely human to talk to and very generous with her time. I learned about her family and its quirks, how she had moved around but stayed in the area for much of her life, her family’s hotels. And also her interest in being able to learn more and share with her son. We were able to piece together some missing genealogy between the photos I found and newly released census records. And the final story came together.
Caribbean Migrant Paths Story
There are so many other stories. Another story — a much more serious one — that I conceived and produced is about the paths that migrants desperate to escape to the U.S. took through the Caribbean Sea. Even though this continues to be a well-covered story, I wanted to make clear for readers that (as anyone raised in Florida knows all too well) the stretches of water traversed are far more perilous than most people realize. Two fantastic WSJ reporters got the byline because it was from their work and expertise I drew most heavily, but I did also conduct my own interviews with Coast Guard officials and atmospheric experts to add to the piece. And in addition to the reporting, editing and photo research, I also took a crack at cartography and made the maps for this story as well.
Obituaries and Gaming Story
When I was on the night photo desk, I did the photo research and visual edit for more than 250 high-profile obituaries. About 100 of those have published so far, everyone from world leaders to religious icons to stars of screen and stage. The queen’s obit was by far the longest research project I’ve ever undertaken. At one point I stepped back to tally the job: somewhere in the ballpark of 419,000 photos, reduced down to a few hundred on the first pass of an edit. But we were ready when the time came. Editors, as a rule, don’t get bylines at the Journal, so only the visual piece has my name on it. As for the rest of the Firm, published obits for Prince Philip and aretrospective for Diana were both my work as well. Working on obits really is a great learning experience. You discover so much about people’s lives and have to have respect for how their last big story and legacy should be told. I have many I’m proud of, but Pelé’s is a recent standout. One final example I worked on falls under very a meat-and-potatoes coverage area for the Journal: business news. The pandemic-era smash hit video game “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” was getting an update from Nintendo, and I wanted to contextualize why that was a big deal for the entire gaming industry while also making it interesting for people who cared about neither Tom Nook nor gaming as a whole. I did quite a bit of number-crunching for this story, much of which informed the reporting but didn’t make it into the final copy. But that doesn’t really matter; I think this is still a great example that proves you can successfully marry a visual format with the kind of deeply reported news that maybe doesn’t seem the most visual at first glance.
Under Construction!
This section is Check back later!
Visitor Counter
You are visitor number: 
Browser Info
Best viewed with: 
or 
Generate your own 90s page here!