Stories

I was lead editor of a five-episode podcast that looked at how oil pipelines, from Keystone XL to Dakota Access to Line 3, have come to the forefront of an epic tug of war between society’s reliance on oil and the risks it faces from consuming fossil fuels.

I led MPR News coverage of escalating protests of the Dakota Access pipeline at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota in 2016. Our intensive reporting served not just our region, but was a critical part of NPR’s national coverage. As part of our effort I led the team that put together an award-winning special, The Protests at Standing Rock: Oil, Water, Race and Treaty Rights.

I performed data analysis and edited the resulting story of how Black drivers bear brunt of routine arrests by St. Anthony PD. This in-depth, data-driven look at arrests in the community in which Philando Castile was killed by a police officer during a traffic stop won multiple regional awards.

I was lead project editor as MPR News set out to report on an underreported fact — that Minnesota’s high school graduation rates for students of color rank among the worst in the nation. We spent nearly a year observing what’s going on in schools, scanning the research and delving deep into the data. We ended up making a profound discovery: Minnesota devotes less to non-classroom student support than any state in the nation. That’s a harsh realization for a state that prides itself on its high educational standards and outcomes. Along the way we bust a few myths on which that reputation rests.

This was a big project and there’s a lot to consume on the collection page linked below. I would single out the centerpiece broadcast story for not only taking a comprehensive look at a complex issue, but also for being one of the most listenable long-form “numbers” stories I’ve ever heard.

 Graduation gap centerpiece story

 Project page link

And if you simply don’t have the time to go through that much material, I produced an animation for social media that distills the main points in 1:33:

I was part of an MPR News team that uncovered a culture of protection for priests accused of sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis (The entirety of that project can be found here). An archbishop would resign and the archdiocese ended up in bankruptcy. My chief role was to lead our reporting on archdiocese financial matters as they related to the abuse scandal. That work shared in the overall project’s DuPont Award and earned a regional Murrow Award of its own.

I edited many stories in that ongoing project. Here’s the documentary on finances that won the Murrow:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Story page link

The challenge here was to create long-form contextual programming about a still-developing story involving the fatal police shooting of a black man and the community’s response to it. I landed on a three-part approach that delivered a complete overview:

1. Conflicting accounts: What happened the night Jamar Clark was shot?
2. Jamar Clark shooting, protests continue strained history between community, police
3. What’s next for Jamar Clark demonstrators and activists?

We set out to do definitive reporting on how climate change is affecting the state. We ended up with a documentary length radio piece and several web components. In addition to a lead editing role on the project, I produced an interactive map showing precisely how temperatures have risen in various regions of Minnesota.

Story page link

This was a quick turnaround online feature that relied on good preparation to execute successfully. When a court-ordered redistricting plan was announced for congressional and state legislative districts, I wanted to let our audience compare the old maps with the new ones. I already had some javascript code from a similar project that a web developer and I repurposed for this one. We ran into some complications with the geodata released by the court, but still managed to get the site working within an hour or two of the announcement. It shows old and new districts side by side, with incumbent residences identified to show who ended up in a different district. It also includes an address locator that allows users to figure out their new districts.

Project page link

Amid several well-publicized suicides that may have been linked to bullying, and a growing national debate on the topic, we wanted to know what Minnesota schools had in place to combat bullying. Turns out the answer in many cases was not much – the result of arguably one of the weakest state laws in the country. At 37 words, it declared that school districts must have an anti-bullying policy, but provided no guidance on what it should contain and no mechanisms for enforcing the meager mandate. That would change after our reports aired. In addition to several radio components, the project included several multimedia components. We requested the anti-bullying policies from all 492 districts and charter schools (all but 19 responded) and posted them for the audience to compare. I compiled information about bullying from a statewide student survey and presented district level information in a series of interactive maps. The project won several awards, including a regional Murrow and Best in Show in the annual Minnesota AP broadcast contest.

Project page link

In the fall semester of 2012 I got to work with a team of University of Minnesota journalism students on what evolved into an ambitious online project on diversity in Minnesota classrooms. Teaching the World in Minnesota looked at how students from more than 100 distinct cultures impact schools in what is often considered a homogeneous state. We ended up with a rich collection of stories, data visualizations and a photo/audio gallery displaying that rich diversity.

 Project home page

MPR News producer Sasha Aslanian established an extremely successful young reporter series that was honored in 2011 with a Casey Journalism Award. Sasha recruited the high school students and young adults and guided them through the reporting process. I had the pleasure of editing these pieces once Sasha got them through a first draft. A sampling of the stories is available here.

At a time when for-profit post-secondary schools were coming under increasing scrutiny nationwide, MPR News uncovered questionable recruitment and financial practices at a Minnesota-based chain of schools. Read the story.