Geoff Dougherty

WORK EXPERIENCE

Editor and President: Founded a newspaper focused on insider coverage of local politics, government and public policy. Recruited and managed a team of staff and freelance writers. Developed marketing materials and built relationships with advertisers. Devised and implemented a social media program and SEO strategy. Wrote, assigned and edited articles for the newspaper and blog posts for our website. Built a high-tech interactive voice response polling system to collect and analyze data on elections.

Editor and CEO: Founded a nonprofit local news website that won international acclaim for its innovative work with digital media and citizen journalists. Recruited and supervised an award-winning team of staff writers and freelancers. Wrote and edited news articles. Managed all aspects of the company’s operations, including finances, fundraising and marketing. Developed and deployed a full-featured content management system based on the Ruby on Rails open source framework.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Staff Writer: Covered police, local government, education and sports stories for a variety of weekly and daily newspapers.

SKILLS

Expertise in court, financial and property records, the Freedom of Information act, source development, computer-assisted reporting, budgeting and financial management, journalism instruction and curriculum design, SEO and social media strategy, computer programming in SAS, SAS Stat, Perl, MS Access, MySQL, MS SQLServer. Web design using Perl, PHP, Ruby on Rails, HTML and CSS.

EDUCATION

The Colorado College, 1992 BA, Latin American Studies