Triple murders. School budgets. The death penalty. A breast-milk sprayer. Drug overdoses. Child killers.
I’m a reporter who has covered stories that are serious and weird, heartwarming and frustrating. But whether it’s a mass murder or a budget decision, I hate to leave a story behind. I believe there’s always a more interesting story behind the initial news.
At The Columbus Dispatch in Columbus, Ohio, I was the lead reporter on a triple-murder and kidnapping in rural Ohio. After the bodies were found – hidden in a hollowed out tree — I continued to cover the case, including a two-day series on the home and mind of the killer and a look at the death penalty and how it’s used in rural counties. I’ve written about county GOP politics, a guy who can’t stop collecting urine and a 12-year-old who shot dead his soon-to-be-stepdad.
Before I came to Ohio, I was a reporter at The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass., where I wrote about paranoid small towns that generate far more ethics complaints than larger cities. I dug through two years’ worth of death certificates to compile data on opiate overdoses. And I uncovered the practice of deporting illegal immigrants before they can ever face trial.
I’m also well-versed in the web. It’s common for me to send photos, text updates and tweets from the scene of a murder or inside a courtroom. I know what readers on the web want, because I’m one of them. In addition to what I’ve learned as a reporter, I have more formal training from my time at the news desk of Boston.com, the website of The Boston Globe. I learned HTML, how to design pages and coordinated content between the newsroom and the web team.
When I’m not reporting, I’m rooting for the Red Sox from afar, riding my bike around Columbus or brewing beer.
