Favorite clips
*Livingston Award finalist
“Harvest of Change” – Des Moines Register/USA Today, September 2014
In summer 2014, I reported in-depth on family farms in Iowa and how they reflect changes in demographics, technology, family structure, immigration and global business. The five-day series, “Harvest of Change,” was complemented by virtual reality technology and 360-degree video for the Oculus Rift headest, the first journalistic endeavor of its kind. The project was presented at the Online News Association conference in Chicago, September 2014. It won Murrow/SABEW/APME/Gannett awards for innovation and I was named a Livingston Award finalist for my work. Read more about it here.
*Alt-Weekly Award winner
“Undercover” – Santa Fe Reporter, October 2011
This long-form narrative won a 2012 AltWeekly Award in feature writing. For this piece, I traveled with an abortion doctor who lives in the Northeast, but flies to clinics in the Midwest and South where there are no local doctors willing to do the procedure. She refers to herself as a “fly-in abortionista.” Localized for the Santa Fe Reporter, the piece also highlights the abortion provider shortage in New Mexico and other states, and how that shortage is becoming starker as more restrictive legislation is being passed around the country. My subject agreed to have me follow her if we used a pseudonym, but a few weeks after the story came out, a New Mexico pro-life group discovered her identity and posted personal information about her, including her address, on the Internet. The doctor was subsequently named Jezebel’s “Woman of the Year” for 2011. Download PDF.
“Harvest of Change” – Des Moines Register/USA Today, September 2014
In summer 2014, I reported in-depth on family farms in Iowa and how they reflect changes in demographics, technology, family structure, immigration and global business. The five-day series, “Harvest of Change,” was complemented by virtual reality technology and 360-degree video for the Oculus Rift headest, the first journalistic endeavor of its kind. The project was presented at the Online News Association conference in Chicago, September 2014. It won Murrow/SABEW/APME/Gannett awards for innovation and I was named a Livingston Award finalist for my work. Read more about it here.
*Alt-Weekly Award winner
“Undercover” – Santa Fe Reporter, October 2011
This long-form narrative won a 2012 AltWeekly Award in feature writing. For this piece, I traveled with an abortion doctor who lives in the Northeast, but flies to clinics in the Midwest and South where there are no local doctors willing to do the procedure. She refers to herself as a “fly-in abortionista.” Localized for the Santa Fe Reporter, the piece also highlights the abortion provider shortage in New Mexico and other states, and how that shortage is becoming starker as more restrictive legislation is being passed around the country. My subject agreed to have me follow her if we used a pseudonym, but a few weeks after the story came out, a New Mexico pro-life group discovered her identity and posted personal information about her, including her address, on the Internet. The doctor was subsequently named Jezebel’s “Woman of the Year” for 2011. Download PDF.
"Haunted by murder" - Star Tribune, August 2016
The murder of a local musician bludgeoned to death with his own guitar has gone unsolved since 1989. But with the creation of a new Cold Case Squad, closure could be imminent. I was drawn to the story of this unsolved mystery, and to the cops who won't give up on it.
"Solidarity and spirit on the bus to D.C." - Star Tribune, January 2017
Hundreds of Minnesotans boarded buses headed for Washington, D.C., to join a global march for women's rights the day after President Donald Trump's inauguration. I rode with them, a day each way, to send dispatches from the road.
Prince coverage - Star Tribune, April 2016
I called in sick on April 21, only to wake up mid-day to the devastating news that Prince, Minnesota's homegrown superstar, had died. I was shocked; just a few days prior, I had seen him not two feet away from me at a party in his Paisley Park compound. I immediately began to tweet about my experience seeing Prince for the first time, and the disbelief that he was gone. My story went viral and I was interviewed by national and international news. This is the Twitter TL that started it all.
“Two worlds, one neighborhood” – Star Tribune, January 2016
For this look at the colliding worlds of adult entertainment and families in one Minneapolis neighborhood, I spent a lot of time at, well, strip clubs. While the locations were a bit different than my usual stories, the result was a feature that I’m as proud of as any other: richly detailed, with colorful characters and whole lot of irony.
“Young politics junkies look to Iowa, not Washington D.C. for college”
“Outside the Iowa caucus spotlight, Iowans wait to be heard” - Mashable, November 2015
When the Democratic debate came to Des Moines, I hit the road and quickly turned two features about the surrounding circus in the first-in-the-nation caucus state. For the first story, I joined a campus tour at the university where the debate was held; star politics high schoolers from around the country were invited to tour the debate set in an effort to woo them to the Des Moines campus instead of D.C. schools. The second story takes a deeper look at the neighborhoods surrounding the debate site, some of the poorest in the city. I took all photos for both of these stories.
"Jews in Middle America fret about attracting Millennials:" - USA Today, 2014
From my work covering local religious communities, local sources led me to a national story. A Jewish student community house opening at Drake University, was financed entirely by the greater Des Moines Jewish community. That turned out to reveal a trend among Jewish communities in mid-sized cities like Des Moines, worried that their younger numbers were dwindling, trying to essentially recruit Jewish Millennials to move to their cities.
The murder of a local musician bludgeoned to death with his own guitar has gone unsolved since 1989. But with the creation of a new Cold Case Squad, closure could be imminent. I was drawn to the story of this unsolved mystery, and to the cops who won't give up on it.
"Solidarity and spirit on the bus to D.C." - Star Tribune, January 2017
Hundreds of Minnesotans boarded buses headed for Washington, D.C., to join a global march for women's rights the day after President Donald Trump's inauguration. I rode with them, a day each way, to send dispatches from the road.
Prince coverage - Star Tribune, April 2016
I called in sick on April 21, only to wake up mid-day to the devastating news that Prince, Minnesota's homegrown superstar, had died. I was shocked; just a few days prior, I had seen him not two feet away from me at a party in his Paisley Park compound. I immediately began to tweet about my experience seeing Prince for the first time, and the disbelief that he was gone. My story went viral and I was interviewed by national and international news. This is the Twitter TL that started it all.
“Two worlds, one neighborhood” – Star Tribune, January 2016
For this look at the colliding worlds of adult entertainment and families in one Minneapolis neighborhood, I spent a lot of time at, well, strip clubs. While the locations were a bit different than my usual stories, the result was a feature that I’m as proud of as any other: richly detailed, with colorful characters and whole lot of irony.
“Young politics junkies look to Iowa, not Washington D.C. for college”
“Outside the Iowa caucus spotlight, Iowans wait to be heard” - Mashable, November 2015
When the Democratic debate came to Des Moines, I hit the road and quickly turned two features about the surrounding circus in the first-in-the-nation caucus state. For the first story, I joined a campus tour at the university where the debate was held; star politics high schoolers from around the country were invited to tour the debate set in an effort to woo them to the Des Moines campus instead of D.C. schools. The second story takes a deeper look at the neighborhoods surrounding the debate site, some of the poorest in the city. I took all photos for both of these stories.
"Jews in Middle America fret about attracting Millennials:" - USA Today, 2014
From my work covering local religious communities, local sources led me to a national story. A Jewish student community house opening at Drake University, was financed entirely by the greater Des Moines Jewish community. That turned out to reveal a trend among Jewish communities in mid-sized cities like Des Moines, worried that their younger numbers were dwindling, trying to essentially recruit Jewish Millennials to move to their cities.