Published Work
I've written hundreds of articles for Southern California News Group, composed of The Orange County Register and 10 other newsrooms in the Greater Los Angeles area. My work has primarily appeared in the Register, which leads SCNG's readership in print and online.
Some of my favorite data-driven stories include:
What are the marijuana laws in your California city? Explore our database of local cannabis policies
I was an integral part of a team of reporters and web developers that created a one-of-a-kind database of marijuana laws by city and county following California's legalization of marijuana for recreational use in 2016.
I helped collect data and facilitate feeds from freelancers and sister papers across the state, and provided a formulaic scoring system and data analysis that led to several discoveries: Foremost, that given the power, city leaders have largely shut the door on recreational shops, the main provision of an initiative approved by 57 percent of voters. I also used Tableau to create a map that presented the data geographically, as well as a graph that compared scores of permissiveness (based on our methodology) to the vote in 482 cities and 57 counties in the state.
The project placed first for Enterprise News Story or Series in the 2018 California Journalism Awards by the California News Publishers Association.
Click map for Tableau interactive
Heart disease, cancer and COVID-19: Orange County’s leading causes of death in 2020
Following the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, I accessed data collected by the California Department of Public Health that tracks and categorizes deaths by cause. I sought to show the true scale of deaths caused by COVID-19 by providing context and presenting deaths by month during the pandemic alongside more routine deaths caused by other diseases and factors.
In the data, I found that COVID-19 ascended to become the third-leading cause of death in Orange County in 2020, behind only heart disease and cancer. It was also important to note that while the findings were significant, totals for recent months likely were undercounts due to the time it takes for death records to be processed and appear in public health data.
How did your neighborhood vote? Ballot data for Orange County reveals curious shifts, splits
After the 2020 presidential election, I processed large data files containing vote tallies by precinct from the Orange County Registrar of Voters to report on a variety of findings, including that more than half of precincts had a gap of more than 10 percentage points between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
I prepared a map in Tableau, first to inform our own reporting and learn where there there were high concentrations of Trump and Biden votes — then to let readers explore how Orange County voted at the neighborhood level. I also used Flourish to show when and how newly-available vote-by-mail ballots were returned.
The story and graphics placed first for Best Use of Data in the 2021 Orange County Press Club Awards.
Click map for Tableau interactive