Writing

Published Writing

I am passionate about investigating data truths, communicating environmental science and increasing public engagement in conversations about evidence and impacts.

Below you will find select works of data journalism, science news and feature writing, newspaper op-eds and radio collaborations.

For the list of my most recent stories (2020 - 2021) as an environment beat reporter for The Spectrum & Daily News — mostly about water security, environmental lawsuits and wildlife issues in southwestern Utah — please see my staff writer page here. (No space to put them all here!)

Data Journalism & Graphics

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Screen Shot 2019-12-30 at 6.13.07 PM.png — Map of oil spills in Louisiana waters after Hurricane Katrina

Data and initial mapping by Joan Meiners, Design by Dan Swenson

Screen Shot 2019-12-30 at 6.13.31 PM.png — Data analysis: history of reported crude oil spills into water all states since 2004.

Data work by Joan Meiners

6-month data investigation into oil spills after Hurricane Katrina and what is being done to hold the responsible companies accountable.

Read Oil Data investigation

ProPublica Polluter’s Paradise Investigative Series

Year-long (2019) series with ProPublica Local Reporting Network investigating pollution from the petrochemical industry in southeast Louisiana with the local paper, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate.

See a shortlist of my stories for the series here.

Read the Full Polluters Paradise Series on the ProPublica Page

Peak florida:

collaborative story series on florida population growth

I worked as the data analyst and produced the title piece for this collaborative series by Cynthia Barnett’s 2018 Environmental Journalism class at the University of Florida.

The series was published in December 2018 by WUFT News, an NPR syndicate.

Read 'Peak Florida'

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This data journalism project was published by WUFT, the Gainesville-area NPR syndicate on December 15, 2017. It is part of a series called Energy Burden from Cynthia Barnett's Environmental Journalism class, which was named as a finalist for Online Depth Reporting in the Annual Mark of Excellence Awards by the National Society of Professional Journalists.

For this project, I filed a public records request, combined and analyzed mulitple data sources, and conducted a series of interviews. My annotated code and reporting sources are documented on Github. My info-graphic is below (larger version included in the story link).