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New homicides map

We just launched this interactive map with details about 2,294 homicides that occurred in D.C. between 2000 and 2011. You can find the killings in your neighborhood, follow the trends over time, and learn how the victims died and what happened to their cases.

Key findings featured in the graphic:
Click the headline to jump straight to that view in the map.

Homicides in D.C. are down 55 percent since 2000
The number of homicides in the District fell last year to 108, a 49-year low. Despite the decline, homicide continues to be a tough crime to solve and prosecute in the city.

Motives: Drug killings down 84 percent
The most common motives for homicide in D.C. are arguments, drugs and retaliation. About 2 percent are classified as gang-related. Homicides involving drugs have decreased about 84 percent since 2000. Drug-related homicides accounted for eight of the city’s killings last year, compared with 49 in 2000.

Most dangerous age: 24 percent of those killed were in their early 20s
More than half of the District’s homicide victims between 2000 and 2011 were between the ages of 15 and 29. About 93 percent of those victims were male, and 94 percent were African American.

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Alternative story formats: Investigation into Alaska native corporations

Two Worlds
Two Worlds

This investigation, which launched September 30, focused on Alaska Native Corporations and their explosive growth during the last decade. I combined photos, graphics and video in a multimedia slideshow. The intention was to build a relationship between the corporations and the shareholders they represent. Alaska natives are some of the nation’s poorest people, and some of the corporations that were supposed to be helping them make their way have instead been funneling money back to contractors in Washington.

Read more and see screen grabs »

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Path of a predator

Timeline of Kevin Ricks' teaching career

After a long week & weekend of wrapping up the Top Secret America project, we hit the ground running with a project that came out today about local teacher Kevin Ricks. A four-month Washington Post investigation of his career revealed a pattern of abuse that goes back to at least 1978 and has a trail of victims that spans the globe. Reporters Josh White, Jennifer Buske, Michael Chandler and Blaine Harden worked on the story, which was just a great piece of reporting. Go read it!

The timeline tells the story through each place Ricks has been, including maps and a list of schools where he worked in each place. It also has audio clips from a hearing where a German student tried unsuccessfully to get a restraining order against Ricks, and myspace messages that Ricks wrote.

This graphic was done using jQuery and CSS. It uses the ColorBox jQuery plugin for the lightbox effect. The audio players are the only Flash pieces in the project — they’re standard across the site (I built them about a year ago). So check it out on your iPad 🙂

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Top Secret connections

After a full year of working on various aspects of the Top Secret America project, we have finally launched! Check out the full project at topsecretamerica.com.

Network connections: Who's involved in the most types of work?
Who's involved in the most types of work?

I worked on a whole bunch of aspects of this project and did a lot of brainstorming and storyboarding, but my primary focus was the interactive “network connections” graphic. In the beginning we wanted to create a graphic that illustrated the redundancy and size of Top Secret America and had a ton of data in it, while not being overwhelming. Read more »

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Map of DC AIDS Providers for Wasting Away series

This morning a project went up that I’ve been working on for a while. Debbie Cenziper investigated this really interesting piece on funding for AIDS providers in D.C.

“In a city ravaged by the highest rate of AIDS cases in the nation, the D.C. Health Department paid millions to nonprofit groups that delivered substandard services or failed to account for any work at all, even as sick people searched for care or died waiting.” – Staggering need, striking neglect

Whitney Shefte also did this beautiful documentary piece on AIDS in DC, which is really touching and a great overview of what’s happening in the city. For the package, I designed the splash page, the chapterized video player for Whitney’s documentary, and a map of providers in the district.

[Map of AIDS Providers in D.C.
Map of D.C. Aids Providers

Mary Kate Cannistra located the agencies and provided me with a base map, and I built this piece that allows sorting through a slider mechanism and with radio button components. You can isolate agencies based on amount of funding, year of award or type of funding. It allows you to get more information by rolling over agencies or by selecting from a dropdown list, which is updated whenever you change the filters. We’ve also highlighted six providers, for which we’ve added extra information (photo and paragraph description).

The slider is reusable, you just initialize it with the two amounts at either end and the data that needs to update. I think we’ll have a lot of use for that functionality moving forward.

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New Graphic: Redskins Lawsuits, Tickets

This graphic was published today, accompanying a story by James Grimaldi about how the Redskins are selling their tickets to brokers. The graphic explores lawsuits filed by the Redskins since 2005 and tickets sold to one broker in 2008. It also shows which tickets they filed lawsuits over and then resold to the broker. The lawsuits are sortable by amount and status, and the tickets are sortable by game.

[Redskins graphic]

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New Series: Fatal Flights

Last Friday The Washington Post published an investigative series, “Fatal Flights,” on medical helicopters in the U.S.

I worked on three graphics for the piece: two for the first day and one that ran Sunday. The first piece, Fatal Crashes Since 1980, combined a timeline, trend data and crash and victim information for all fatal crashes since 1980.


We also put together this timeline of the 2008 Maryland crash that uses audio and maps to piece together what happened during the search for Trooper 2.



I also created this simple state-by-state map that incorporates filters for different data points. The map shows how helicopters are concentrated throughout the states and how helicopter numbers relate to medicare population and trips.