About

I’m the director of product and product design at The Washington Post. My team finds ways to grow the business by identifying opportunities to improve our products. We work on subscription products, like the paywall, profile and acquisition funnel, as well as our homepage, article page, navigation, native apps, and email products. We develop strategic and tactical approaches to company and user problems and build delightful, forward-thinking and useful products.

I love working with and leading teams, finding common ground and building on it, and creating great work, whether it’s to solve business or editorial problems. I believe in hiring smart designers, creative problem solvers and exceptional storytellers and creating an environment where my team can do their best work.

Until January 2018, I was The Post’s Graphics Director. I led the graphics team, which includes infographics, news apps and digital story design. My team published work on every digital platform, with a special emphasis on mobile and social, and in the print product.

I conceived, project managed and edited visual stories of all sizes, from breaking news to medium and long-term enterprise. In addition, I led the development of tools and templates that make visual storytelling easier for everyone in our organization. Check out our projects.

In my first four years at The Washington Post, I focused on the design and front-end development of interactive graphics — especially maps and data visualizations — and innovative story experiences for digital platforms that often included video and photography.

I went to the University of North Carolina, where I studied multimedia and photojournalism and graduated with a degree in Journalism and Mass Communication. I was an intern at USA TODAY and worked for The Baltimore Sun before joining the Post.

I co-taught a course on communicating with design at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies in the fall of 2013.

From 2010-2012, I was a part of the faculty of the National Security Reporting Project at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, an investigative project that takes place in the fall. In 2010, the project we did won an OJA for best student multimedia project.

Sometimes I speak at conferences. Check out a video of one of my talks here.

I’m a native North Carolinian from a small town in western N.C. called Franklin, where some of my family still lives. I’m the youngest of seven girls. Yes, no brothers! I love to read. A lot. I’ve been running a book club since 2010 and I’m obsessed with Goodreads.

Anything on this blog is my opinion and does not reflect the position of my employer, The Washington Post. All graphics are reproduced from The Washington Post, unless otherwise noted.

Selected Work

Sin Luz

Sin Luz: Life without Power Published in The Washington Post, December 2017 I was a lead editor and project manager on this story, which showed the difficulty of life without power after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, and the resilience of the Puerto Rican people as they dealt with the challenges. In addition to smart …

Your Brain on Art

Your Brain on Art Published in The Washington Post, September 2017 I was a lead editor and project manager on this story, which explained the effect that performance art has on the human brain. We combined video, motion graphics, composite photography and words into a stunningly rich visual experience. Role: Editing, project management, storyboarding, prototyping

Visually communicating uncertainty: An experiment

I was just reading this article by Nate Silver in fivethirtyeight, which explores the different ways journalists miscommunicate probabilities. This particular sentence caught my interest: “People associate numbers with precision, so using numbers to express uncertainty in the form of probabilities might not be intuitive.” So, what if we tried to visually communicate that imprecision. …

Speaking and presentations

Doing it on deadline: 22 lessons from covering the news
Here’s a presentation I did at the University of Maryland Visualization Speaker Series in Oct. 2014.

More presentations:
SND Denver (2010)
Malofiej 19 (March 2011, Pamplona, Spain)
APME NewsTrain DC (March 2011)
NPR’s DUXcamp unconference (October 2011, DC)
NICAR St. Louis (February 2012), see presentation
Infographics Congress (March 2012, Netherlands)
Interactive Design workshop (May 2013, UNC)
ONA13 (October 2013, Atlanta)
CIC Impact Summit (September 2014, DC)
SND Scandinavia (October 2014, Copenhagen)
UMD Visualization Speaker Series (October 2014)
SND DC (April 2015)
News Impact Summit Milan (March 2016)
SND SF (April 2016)
NABJ/NAHJ (August 2016, DC)
Poynter Digital Design Challenge (October 2016, NYC), watch here
News Impact Summit Budapest (September 2017)
ONA17 (October 2017, DC), watch here
Infovis (October 2017, Mexico City)
SND NYC (March 2018)
DesignThinkers (October 2018, Toronto)
Paid Content Summit (Feb. 2019, Berlin)
Poynter Leadership Academy for Women (April 2019)