From my first locator map, traced painstakingly in MacPaint while I was at Nashville Business Journal a while back, I’ve been interested in data visualization. That’s also because I’ve always been interested in data and how it can reveal problems in society or add context to a story. While working …
After a minor but highly unusual earthquake shook East Tennessee in December, USA TODAY editors wondered whether the Big One could hit the East Coast. The answer: A major fault line sits right beside the Mississippi River, and scientists have evidence that the area has felt major earthquakes for at …
As I looked for stories to share on a slow New Year’s Eve, I came across a long but intriguing piece from one of the USA TODAY Network’s smaller sites, the Kitsap (County) Sun in Bremerton, Washington. State troopers had jailed a woman who lived on the east side of …
Ten days after Virginia’s governor left office in January 2014, he and his wife were indicted on 14 counts of corruption, accepting bribes and obstructing an investigation. At one time, former Gov. Robert “Bob” McDonnell was considered a Republican rising star and was Mitt Romney’s potential running mate in the …
The Mega Millions lottery jackpot was up past a half billion dollars, so I knew that online interest would be high. The drawing was that night. What neither I nor a USA TODAY reporter had was any story that said this beyond a bare-bones, no-quotes item. I found a day-old …
Until Jan. 1, 2019, Gannett had an agreement with the television stations that used to be a part of the company until it split in two pieces in June 2015. We could post stories, photos and video from the Tegna TV stations, and they could post USA TODAY Network content. …
Part of my job on the USA TODAY Network national desk has been to spot intriguing stories from the sites with the potential to go viral. So I look at a lot of real-time metrics and use my gut to see what makes sense to share with a wider audience. …
Normally, a story pitched to us about pushback on a library story hour would be acknowledged but not posted on usatoday.com because it is too local. This time, the story from The Daily Advertiser in Lafayette, Louisiana, about drag queens who fight bullying and discrimination by reading to toddlers and …
In 2018 before Los Angeles teachers conceived of their strike this year, educators in Arizona, Kentucky, Oklahoma and West Virginia walked off their jobs for a time because of long-running disputes with state officials that came to a flash point. The Courier Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, was focused on minute-by-minute …
The challenge with this column wasn’t a lack of context or an inexperienced writer. After all, the author is a former publisher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The storytelling was superb. But the piece was long, and the intersections of the lives of a daughter adopted and her now-dead birth …
