NEWS.

Documents: Annotated reporting

WOWT, Nebraska’s oldest TV station, celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2024. There was much talk of talent who had come and gone, those still frequenting local screens — and of course, Johnny Carson, who got his start in television under the station’s very first call letters.

Amid the gathering of photos and editing of videos, a document came into our possession that marked the earliest days of WOW’s transition from radio to television.

It was the text of a speech delivered on March 12, 1948, by WOW AM radio General Manager Bill Wiseman at the start of the WOW Commercial TV Clinic held at Hotel Fontenelle. He was pitching “some great historical event… some big deal” — television — and how it would transform advertising in particular.

Using DocumentCloud embeds, I pulled excerpts from the actual speech document, adding more historical context than a mere text quote could.

Interactives: Illustrating political divides

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling rendering Roe v. Wade powerless, Nebraska was among the states wrestling with the abortion issue. In 2024, dueling petitions were circulated — and later certified: Both sides of the issue would indeed appear on the same ballot in November.

When the Secretary of State released the exact language that would be appearing on ballots, I used DocumentCloud embeds to show what the two items would look like to voters.

To give the audience a sense of where each side of the issue stood in terms of signature counts — which could give insight into how each ballot initiative vote counts might fall — I pulled the numbers into an interactive chart.

Keeping the record straight

In the first 10 days of each Nebraska Unicameral session, state senators file hundreds of bills. It’s a daunting prospect for most any local newsroom to even attempt to track them all, especially since most won’t get far under normal circumstances and even fewer when that particular Legislature is prone to filibusters.

Still, it was the first legislative session under a new governor after a contentious election; and I felt strongly about giving our audience a sense of the information in a way that would be meaningful in as many ways as possible.

Each day, I looked through the list of filed bills and pulled out a few to summarize. But the featured content each day was the graphical elements I created to track the number of bills each senator filed across each of the days as well as the subject matter of every bill filed. I pulled that information into word clouds and then created a comprehensive animation to give an impression of the bills’ content and a sense of the work put in by individual senators.

Each story also included a link to the previous and next days as well as a progressive stack of each day’s graphical representations of the bills so that our audience could navigate through the days as they liked.

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I also established a standard practice for the digital team to post a record of how the senators and representatives vote on high-interested bills, from border security to abortion to IVF; from tracking how our lawmakers voted in ousting House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to the votes that installed his replacement.

Liveblogging: Real-time trial coverage

I introduced liveblogging to my newsroom in 2023, and it soon became one of the most compelling tools we use to cover high-interest local trials. It’s opened up a whole way for us to provide real-time coverage to our audience while also offering another means of communication between the reporter and the newsroom. Producers were able to see what sort of details were coming out of the trial instead of getting batch emails with bullet points, which enabled them to start building out the TV coverage before the day’s proceedings had concluded. 

While the reporter was writing live updates from court, I was organizing, formatting, and augmenting their posts before pulling the details information into a comprehensive daily web story with links to our previous coverage. 

Aldrick Scott was convicted in March 2024 of killing his ex-girlfriend, Cari Allen, in Omaha after driving from Kansas to spy on her. He tracked her to a bar where she was on a date, then drove to her home and lay in wait for her to return. After killing her and disposing of her body at a property near Topeka, he fled to Belize where he bragged about being a criminal to a restaurant owner, who subsequently turned him in to authorities there.

As this case evolved, it became clear that our coverage would be best served by a timeline to track all the developments. This coverage also included an interactive timeline I built using the JS Timeline while were tracking the case after Allen went missing and continued updating when her body was discovered, when police tracked Scott down in Belize, and throughout his five-day trial.

Once the trial got underway, I set up a liveblog for our reporter with 24LiveBlog so that he could provide real-time updates on the court case, which was particularly compelling when the defendant took the stand.

YouTube: Bringing an un-postable concert to life

One of the most popular articles we’ve had on our site to date was a post I wrote in August 2023 about one of Jelly Roll’s stops in Omaha. Ahead of his concert, he made a point to visit and talk with local inmates — something he’s since become known for. He also performed a special acoustic concert for them. The station had access to the entire recording but couldn’t post the video because of copyright issues; so I listened to the entire performance and wrote up his comments between songs, then punctuated the article with YouTube videos of each song he performed to give as close a replication of the entire experience as I could for our audience.

Previous newsroom projects

Much of my 25 years in journalism was spent in Southern California, where I helped conceptualize and build dataviz for a large-scale unsolved homicides project; managed digital assets for a widespread FOIA records project on teacher misconduct in schools across the largest county in the U.S.; and wrote a social media campaign for a newsroom project there that went on to win a Pulitzer.

I was also able to participate in an immersive project with Esri, a leading global GIS company; and work alongside the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism to edit and design a special report on earthquake preparedness at Southern California hospitals.

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MARKETING.

From PDF to interactive.

I didn’t build the CMS at omahacm.org or stringsprouts.org, but I did figure out the best way to use elements available within our existing CMS structures to create “microsites” and bring PDF versions of our class schedules and bi-annual mailers to life, taking into consideration UX and performance across platforms.

I also assisted with database management for a program evaluation conducted on the String Sprouts program by the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Munroe-Meyer Institute.

Cultivating a community online.

[ Sample Social Media Campaign Strategy • Campaign Portfolio ]

Actually, maintaining — and more importantly, GROWING — a social media presence for a brand or an organization takes planning and perseverance. And if you’re trying to make an impact with a campaign or participate in a drive, strategy is key, with a hefty dose of analytics and a side of course-correction. Because in social media, the game is always changing.

A whole new take on annual reports.

Before Fall 2016, Omaha Conservatory of Music newsletters looked much like you would expect any sort of quarterly marketing publication to look: 8-12 pages measuring 8.5″ x 11″ with many paragraphs summarizing each initiative or accomplishment in the organization since the previous edition.

I blew up that model, using my experience with design, readability and audience to transform our standard-issue newsletter into a compact, heavyweight booklet that said more with far less words. I wrote the copy, selected the photos, built an infographic, and art directed the entire project, prompting readers to explore the Conservatory’s website at several points along the way. The result was a marketing piece the entire staff was proud to show off — and one we could effectively build the organization’s year-end appeal around.

And then I brought it all to life online.

A marketing brochure with room for more.

A new building and a new brand deserved a whole new way to talk about what happens at the Omaha Conservatory of Music. So I conceptualized a fold-out brochure that is a perfect fit to layer in 4×6 card inserts with more details on individual programs and initiatives to align with our goals.

Annual reports at a glance.

Following the success of our reconfigured brochure, I ran with the same concept for the Conservatory’s annual reports. I also constructed an infographic at the center of it all to tell the story of the impact of the String Sprouts program.