WORK
Below are samples of my work and achievements of which I am especially proud. Each piece represents not only journalism I am proud to have produced, but also an experience from which I learned a great deal.
ABC NEWS - BROADCAST PIECES
ABC News' Visual Verification team is part social newsgathering, part visual forensics. We monitor social media for interesting stories and visuals on ongoing news, breaking news situations, or looking for brand new stories. Additionally, we also verify all user generated content that comes through the News division, from videos of explosions in Ukraine, to protests in Iran, to hurricane damage. We use open source intelligence and original reporting to make sure everything we put on screen is accurate and in context.
Our material appears in nearly every show, every single day, on the network. But we also contribute in a larger way to more in depth pieces that use verified video or analysis to tell stories. These are a few examples of those.
SETTLER VIOLENCE IN THE WEST BANK
While our team on the ground spoke with people in the West Bank, I verified multiple different instances of violence against, and displacement of, Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7th. I spoke with human rights organisations, activists, and witnesses on the ground, as well as geolocating and chronolocating the videos. The videos of these instances were used in the broadcast piece and the analysis in the accompanying text piece. In verifying the videos I also mapped them and created graphics to better visualize, some of these appear in the text piece.
ABC NEWS - VISUAL INVESTIGATIONS
As part of my job on the visual verification team, I have the opportunity to explore investigate topics using open source intelligence tools to tell stories we might not otherwise have been able to tell.
MAPPING THE BORDER BREACHES ON OCTOBER 7th
In the immediate aftermath of the October 7th Hamas attack, I watched all the Hamas and PIJ videos from that day to build together a visual profile of where they broke through and where they went. I identified six individual fence breakthroughs and hundreds more locations using geolocation. I created new graphics templates to plot them on a map in visually digestible way, and used those graphics to expand on the initial story with many more internal notes that were built into broadcast stories and editorial for our news coverage.
ISRAEL STRIKES GAZA SAFE ZONE DESPITE OFFICIAL DESIGNATION
I worked on two separate pieces addressing IDF airstrikes on areas that the army had designated as safe for civilians. In both of these I used satellite imagery and mapping software to identify damage to areas. One piece examined all airstrike damage in the city of Deir al-Balah in the first 3 months of the war, the second was a more in depth look at 8 specific airstrikes in the so-called "humanitarian zone" in the summer of 2024. For this piece, for every strike, I used witness video, testimony, official statements, satellite imagery, and expert analysis, to thoroughly investigate the attacks.
ABC NEWS - DIGITAL VIDEO
While our day to day operation is focused on the broadcast arm of the network, in the last year, the Visual Verification team has found new ways to tell stories using UGC and open source material. One of these is visual timelines, which require extreme precision and a huge newsgathering effort before analysis even begins.
LAHAINA FIRE TIMELINE
For this project, we collected hundreds of videos from people in Lahaina, geolocated them, and using metadata and chronlocation, were able to sort them both geographically and chronologically. I created a new workspace for us to keep track of all video, locations, and times, as well as the people involved and interviews associated with them, which the team now use for all these types of projects. Starting from our huge trove of video evidence, we then pieced together how the catastrophe unfolded and visually outlined it using the UGC, interviews, graphics, and maps.
LAHAINA FIRE TIMELINE
For this project, we collected hundreds of videos from people in Lahaina, geolocated them, and using metadata and chronlocation, were able to sort them both geographically and chronologically. I created a new workspace for us to keep track of all video, locations, and times, as well as the people involved and interviews associated with them, which the team now use for all these types of projects. Starting from our huge trove of video evidence, we then pieced together how the catastrophe unfolded and visually outlined it using the UGC, interviews, graphics, and maps.
ABC NEWS - VIDEO ANALYSIS
I do video analysis on individual videos every single day but in certain instances groups of videos can be viewed together to tell a larger story, or watching several videos allows us to find stories we didn't know we could tell until we watched them all together. Below are a few stories born out of visual analysis that became text stories.
MAPPING THE BORDER BREACHES ON OCTOBER 7th
In the immediate aftermath of the October 7th Hamas attack, I watched all the Hamas and PIJ videos from that day to build together a visual profile of where they broke through and where they went. I identified six individual fence breakthroughs and hundreds more locations using geolocation. I created new graphics templates to plot them on a map in visually digestible way, and used those graphics to expand on the initial story with many more internal notes that were built into broadcast stories and editorial for our news coverage.
MAPPING THE BORDER BREACHES ON OCTOBER 7th
In the immediate aftermath of the October 7th Hamas attack, I watched all the Hamas and PIJ videos from that day to build together a visual profile of where they broke through and where they went. I identified six individual fence breakthroughs and hundreds more locations using geolocation. I created new graphics templates to plot them on a map in visually digestible way, and used those graphics to expand on the initial story with many more internal notes that were built into broadcast stories and editorial for our news coverage.