We Are Not Divided

In the charged lead-up to the 2020 US election, I led a core team of nine at Reasons to be Cheerful in a six-week special collaborative project featuring stories from around the world that highlighted the human capacity to overcome division.

I built and managed daily content-sharing partnerships with six media outlets (The Guardian, Freakonomics, CBC, Next City, the Marshall Project and The Tyee), and an academic collaboration with Stanford’s Polarization and Social Change Lab. I also built a partnership with the Solutions Journalism Network to offer training in Complicating the Narrative to all reporters working on the project.

I tag-teamed with my co-editor to assign, edit and art direct 24 native articles plus a five-part video series that we co-developed with a brilliant host collaborator. Two favourites I edited include a piece about a more constructive way to get rid of a racist statue, illustrated by a brilliant Indigenous comic book artist, and a story about two men whose unlikely relationship changed the course of their country’s history. One of my favourite videos from the project is a beautiful conversation between an evangelical Christian and a gay rights activist who are close friends.

I worked closely with a web developer to imagineer a special web template for the microsite that could grow and shift with easy drag and drop modules as new content was added daily. David Byrne drew custom illustrations for the site and I found a kick-ass animator to bring the illustrations to life. We even put those zany little drawings on merch to fundraise for the project, and they became the basis of gallery exhibit in New York, and a fancy-shmancy art book.

Experience the full glory of We Are Not Divided for yourself or read about it in Flood Magazine.

Moving Forward

In the midst of a highly politicized transportation funding referendum in Metro Vancouver, journalists had little access to usable data and information about the transportation system. The result was conflict- and opinion-driven news coverage in the media, and a general public that was uninformed about the issues they were voting on.

My team at Discourse Media created an independent data journalism project, produced with the support of academic and professional researchers, dedicated to mining, analyzing and visualizing the wealth of information and data about Metro Vancouver’s transportation system.

I was the lead reporter and editor on this eight-part series of investigative content packages including written features, data interactives, infographics and raw data sets, all licensed under creative commons with embed codes for any media outlet to use. We partnered with PlaceSpeak, a public consultation platform where readers posed questions for our reporters to investigate, and responded to 50 reporting requests.

Over the course of the 10-week project, over 1.3 million people engaged with Moving Forward content on the project’s website, social media and through media outlets that republished infographics, articles and data interactives. The average length of visit on the Moving Forward website was over 30 minutes and the project generated content in over a dozen local and national outlets covering the referendum.

The star of Moving Forward was the infographics and data interactives. I sourced many of the data sets in collaboration with data analysts and designers and made key strategic decisions about presentation and packaging. One favourite is the Cost of Commute Calculator (explainer article here), which also sparked a global conversation when it was featured on The Atlantic’s CityLab.

Journalists reported that Moving Forward helped shift media angles from conflict-driven to data-driven in media outlets across the region.

“In a debate characterized by at best noise and at worst outright lies about our transit system, Moving Forward shone out as an honest, data-driven look at the real challenges of moving people in this region — and the people of Metro Vancouver are better off for it.” - Jon Woodward, Reporter, CTV News Vancouver

Moving Forward received an Innovation Award from the Canadian Federation of Journalists and was a finalist in the International Editor Network’s Data Journalism Awards.

Access to Energy Fellowship

When the Waterloo Global Science Initiative was looking for creative communications strategies around their focus at the time — energy poverty — we came to them with a better idea: fund a journalism fellowship to support independent reporting on the issue instead. I conceived the Access to Energy Journalism Fellowship, and worked with WGSI to develop a framework for my team at Discourse Media to administer it independently. I oversaw the first portion of the fellowship: advertising it, selecting global fellows and developing a collaboration framework.

Fellows produced work that was featured in the New York Times, Al Jazeera, Thompson Reuters Foundation, The Globe and Mail, The Zimbabwean, Republica Nepal, The Guardian and many more. The content also lived on a microsite, accompanied by additional native reporting and data visualization by Discourse reporters.

When I first came on board to re-launch Reasons to be Cheerful, it was a blog-style site with sporadic content, reach and readership. My job was to transform it into a full-fledged online magazine. I assembled an editorial, web and audience engagement team and, together with my new co-editor, rallied a troop of brilliant global freelancers.

I built a budget, and a plan to maximize limited funding for the non-profit publication while not skimping where it mattered. I worked to raise freelance rates to good industry standards, and created staff positions that expanded the number of voices sitting around the editorial table. I led the launch of a beautiful new site, and set goals and frameworks for impact assessment.

Alongside editing daily content, I produced analytics reports and audience surveys that guided our editorial decision making. I led the team in developing strategic plans to meet goals that we set each year, and helped communicate this to the board and to funders. I also kept us on budget.

Along the way, here are just a few of the questions I helped my team address:

• How quickly and aggressively do we want to grow our audience. Who do we want them to be?

• How do we balance leveraging the powerful name of our founder with letting the publication stand on its own?

• We have so many partnership opportunities — what is our criteria matrix for choosing?

• What are our values and goals, and how do we make sure our content is supporting both?

• Where do we want to be a year from now? Five years from now?

• We aren’t reaching X target audience. How do we fix that?

At Discourse Media, we were innovating a new model for producing journalism. That meant having a razor-sharp idea of what we were doing, while retaining the flexibility to experiment and change. Some of the questions we had to address collectively as a team included:

• Where are our boundaries around accepting funding?

• How do we work with collaborators with widely varying styles and tones?

• How do we try new and creative things while retaining journalistic rigour?

• How does our organizational culture reflect our values?

• What does success look like for us?

These aren’t the kinds of questions that are answered just once. At Discourse, they came up every time we started a new project, and that’s normal as organizations shift and grow. I build plans that include opportunities for reassessment, analysis and course correction.

I’m currently working on a project with the wonderful PopShift dedicated to creating the necessary infrastructure to support collaborations between local journalists and Hollywood’s best to make meaningful film and TV.

After five years of leading research for Happy City (2013, Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Doubleday; Penguin), I worked alongside professional facilitators to help translate the concepts of the book into a hands-on, highly interactive workshop for urban planners and policymakers. I delivered the workshop and complementary keynotes throughout Europe and North America to health authorities, governments and organizations like the WHO and UN-Habitat who wanted to integrate concepts of happiness into urban design policy.

I also hosted a night of mad science where we invited sociologists, neuroscientists, artists and others to explore the book’s concepts through a live event of interactive experiments that left even my parents rolling on the ground with joy.

After I co-authored a three-part book series (Participatory City, 2013, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation), it was translated into a digital gallery and later an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

I’ve executed two creative collaborations with a Broadway show and once I planned an event that turned my investigative data journalism project into a (very full and very competitive) trivia night.

I built an e-reader funded by the Knight Foundation and scripted, cut, shot and voiced video for my very own super sweet MSN travel vlog (that’s right, vlog). I’ve worked on plenty of other collaborative video projects, and have scripted, voiced and directed animated journalistic explainer videos.

I have not one but two tattoos inspired by my journalism projects. Once I saw a tweet that someone I don’t know got a tattoo inspired by one of my projects, too.

One day I’ll write a musical about mining with Chris Pollon.

Select awards and fellowships

Business and Sustainability Fellowship, Solutions Journalism Network (2021) (Reasons to be Cheerful)

Silver Medal from the Digital Publishing Awards (2017) (Discourse Media)

Innovation Award from the Canadian Journalism Foundation (2016) (Discourse Media)

Solutions Journalism Fellowship from Ashoka Canada (2015) (Discourse Media)

Media That Matters Inspirit Fellowship from Story Money Impact (2015) (Discourse Media)

Bob Carty Fellowship from Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (2015) (Discourse Media)

Finalist for Best Data Journalism Website of the Year from the Global Editors Network’s International Data Journalism awards (2015) (Discourse Media)

Select public speaking/workshops

Presentation, panel discussion Housing in the City: Beyond the Headlines, Simon Fraser University Public Square. Vancouver, British Columbia, November 2, 2015

Keynote presentation, workshop, panel discussion Empowering Adaptable Communities Summit, Atlantic Center for Population Health Sciences (Atlantic Health System). Morristown, New Jersey, USA, October 21, 2015

Keynote presentation Conference on Health Promotion, City of Vienna Health Promotion. Vienna, Austria, September 14, 2015

Keynote presentation, panel discussion, workshops Healthy Cities Business and Technical Conference – Political Choices for Healthy Cities, World Health Organization. Kuopio, Finland, June 24-26, 2015

Workshop, fellow mentorship Amplify Your Impact, K880 Emerging City Fellows Summit, Knight Foundation, 880 Cities. Toronto, Ontario, Canada, June 15, 2015

Keynote presentation, National Congress on Housing and Homelessness, Canadian Housing and Renewal Association. Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada April 30, 2015

Workshop, High Ground Conference, Columbia Institute and Center for Civic Governance. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, March 20, 2015

Keynote presentation, panel discussion, workshops, International Healthy Cities Conference, World Health Organization and UN Habitat. Athens, Greece, Oct 22-25, 2014

Keynote presentation, Summer Design Series, Design Museum Boston. Sommerville, Massachusetts, USA, July 24, 2014

Presentation, advisor, Action Canada. Charlevoix, Quebec, Canada. June 14, 2014

Panel discussion, Urban-Suburban Divide: Can you build the life you want at a price you can afford? University of British Columbia Dialogues. Richmond, British Columbia, Canada, March 19, 2014