📰 Editor in Chief and Digital Strategy Director at The Diamondback
The DBK's COVID-19 Dashboard
After UMD released its coronavirus dashboard, I kept tabs on the community’s reaction, and I found that many people — staff, faculty, students, parents, College Park residents alike — were struggling to interpret the visualizations. So I used the university’s publicly available data, along with data I got through information act requests and data from the county and state, to provide a more comprehensive and accessible dashboard tracking the extent of the virus’s spread in the area. I updated the data every day for 10 months, tweeting some of the more notable developments.
Other COVID-19 coverage
- Wrote explainer newsletters for the university community as the school closed in March 2020. Examples here, here and here.
- Converted those explainers to social graphics for Instagram and Snapchat.
- Implemented and monitored a tip line, which led us to break the news about the first cases in campus housing, among other stories
Live Zoom Town Hall with UMD’s New President
I worked for weeks to plan, execute and moderate a live Zoom town hall with UMD’s new president about plans for the fall semester, liaising with the university communications department to ensure The Diamondback would have total editorial control over the questions we asked. To promote the event and solicit community questions, I created a newsletter campaign and Twitter and Instagram graphics. Ultimately, 800 students showed up to hear the answers to the questions they cared about.
I also collaborated with different student groups on campus, including the Residence Hall Association and PLUMAS, a Latinx advocacy group, to set up a process for them to ask questions directly to the president. I helped them refine their questions to best reflect the information they wanted to know. For the event itself, I coordinated social media and website coverage, with one reporter live tweeting and one writing an article for our site.
Audience Engagement Strategy
- Created analytics insight reports for Maryland Media Inc and facilitated a switch to Google Data Studio reports. Examples here, here and here.
- Developed social media strategy from website traffic analysis and implemented a new procedure for testing the impact of our new initiatives.
- Helped manage The Diamondback’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and daily newsletters.
Social Creation
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Election Day Profiles
- Devised and coordinated a real-time social media campaign showcasing the 12 hours of Election Day for Twitter and Instagram.
- Created and posted graphics spotlighting voters in the community in real time, using interviews and photos sent from the site.
Writing and Reporting
News
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Indoor and outdoor dining to resume in Prince George’s County on Monday, with restrictions
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PGPD’s Hector Velez to serve as interim chief during search for a new leader
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All Maryland hospitals will have COVID-19 vaccine doses within two weeks
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Incoming UMD freshmen debate on-campus living amid mostly virtual fall semester
For this story, I scraped the University of Maryland’s registration site to get data about how many course
sections would be in-person in the fall 2020 semester. Informed by that data,
I talked to several freshmen about their plans for the fall and how they were making their decisions.
Arts and culture
News
- Indoor and outdoor dining to resume in Prince George’s County on Monday, with restrictions
- PGPD’s Hector Velez to serve as interim chief during search for a new leader
- All Maryland hospitals will have COVID-19 vaccine doses within two weeks
-
Incoming UMD freshmen debate on-campus living amid mostly virtual fall semester
For this story, I scraped the University of Maryland’s registration site to get data about how many course sections would be in-person in the fall 2020 semester. Informed by that data, I talked to several freshmen about their plans for the fall and how they were making their decisions.
Arts and culture
For a full archive of my writing at The Diamondback, click here.