2005-present Chi-Town Daily News, Chicago, IL Editor and CEO: Founded a non-profit local news website that quickly became known as one of the most progressive new media operations in the country. Recruited journalists, wrote and edited news articles, edited and produced online video programming, managed all aspects of the company’s fundraising and marketing programs. Developed and deployed a full-featured content management system based on the Ruby on Rails open source framework.
2001-2005 Chicago Tribune, Chicago, IL Staff Writer: Worked as a member of the newspaper’s award-winning investigative team. Employed advanced statistical techniques to analyze large government databases to produce reports on public sector performance and malfeasance. Taught reporting and database skills at national industry seminars. Reported and wrote enterprise stories on international and national business trends. Designed and implemented the newsroom’s Intranet.
2000-2001 Miami Herald, Miami, FL Database Editor: Reported and wrote high-profile investigative articles as a member of the newspaper’s investigative team. Employed federal highway records to expose safety flaws in the Ford Explorer. Obtained and analyzed county and state criminal court records to show how juvenile offenders were often mistreated in the justice system. Exposed widespread illegal voting and systematic problems with the nation’s electoral system in the wake of the 2000 presidential election. Led the paper’s effort to recount and analyze discarded ballots from the election.
1997-2001 St. Petersburg Times, St. Petersburg, FL Staff Writer: Documented Medicare fraud at a local non-profit mental health facility. Wrote daily reports on criminal and civil trials and trends in the legal system.
1995-1997 The Bergen Record, Hackensack, NJ Police Reporter: Wrote daily stories on developments in the law-enforcement community. Used public records to document a crash-for-cash insurance fraud scheme involving a health clinic run by a convicted organized crime associate.
Conversational Spanish, expertise in court, financial and property records, the Freedom of Information act, source development, computer programming in SAS, SAS Stat, Perl, MS Access, MySQL, MS SQLServer. Web design using Perl, PHP, Ruby on Rails, HTML and CSS.
The Colorado College, 1992 BA, Latin American Studies