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.
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 - 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 - SATELLITE IMAGES
In my work with open source intelligence, I've told multiple stories using satellite images as a jumping off point, or as the central piece of evidence in a story. I publicly available tools like sentinel hub to identify problems or phenomena, and then follow up with reporting and visual analysis to tell a variety of stories.
COBALT MINING IN KOLWEZI, DRC
Having read about the frenzy for cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I went on sentinel hub to see if it was possible to visually identify the increased activity from space. Sure enough, several mines had increased in size, swallowing up the city of Kolwezi, both officially, and in some cases, unofficially, due to artisanal mining. Using these images as a starting point, I spoke with human rights organisations, mining experts, unions on the ground, and mining companies about the changing face of Kolwezi and mining operations in the region. Several months later, the same satellite imagery featured in an Amnesty report about the city.
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.
CITRUSTV - GENERAL MANAGER
CitrusTV is the United States' largest entirely student run television studio. From December 2018 to December 2019, I was the studio's general manager. In this position, I oversaw all studio activity, 11 different shows over 3 departments: news, sports, and entertainment. I was also the studio's fiscal agent, proposing and then managing a 145,000$ annual budget, and working with news and production companies about contracts and purchases. Day to day, I worked to improve our content across the board, and spearheaded many new initiatives. Below are some of the projects and achievements of which I am most proud.
CITY OF SYRACUSE SPECIAL
Because CitrusTV runs so many regularly scheduled shows, we often forego more in-depth reporting for content that can be turned around quickly. That's why I had the idea of producing a special specifically focused on in depth community reporting, about the issues facing the city of Syracuse. The program was a reporter centered, hour long show, that featured new ways of reporting data using our green screen, and a new, more conversational anchor arrangement. I fleshed out the idea with the help of Isha Battu and Erin Lyons, who then produced the show. I acted as an Associate Producer and the Technical Director. The show won a BEA award for achievement in NewsMagazine.