Can This Man Hold on to His Mortgage?

VIDEO

Eliseo Guardado came to the United States in search of his own American Dream. But after he bought his home in a Maryland suburb in 2006, his dream quickly became a nightmare. Long Beach Mortgage, a subsidiary of Washington Mutual, put him in a loan that he could not afford. I co-produced a video documenting the fate of Guardado's subprime loan and illustrating how fraud in the loan process was at the center of the largest bank failure in American history.

Patient Safety in a Digital Age

GRAPHICS

Our health IT reporters have been focusing on the Obama administration's $27 billion push to expand electronic medical records technology across the country. The stimulus-backed initiative has raised questions about patient safety, privacy, government oversight -- and the lack of coordinated data on these systems. I created a graphic illustrating the decentralization of patient safety data and the extent to which various health entities track and share such information.

Hard Times Profiteers

CROWD-SOURCING

Two of our financial reporters have been investigating the ways in which distressed homeowners have been targeted amid the foreclosure crisis. Hard Times Profiteers aimed at engaging readers in the series, which is still ongoing. Our call for tips generated more than 100 leads from homeowners, real estate brokers, advocates, lawyers and others with first-hand stories of real estate schemes. We also experimented with a user-generated map of "bandit signs" across the country.

Consumer Agency Gains, But Foes Remain

VIDEO

A year after Congress approved $700 billion in federal funds to bail out financial institutions at the heart of the economic meltdown, lawmakers grappled over reform legislation. I co-produced a video (and chart) exploring some of the key challenges to President Obama's proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, a new watchdog agency that would have broad powers over banks and financial institutions.

• Related Chart: Guide to Financial Regulatory Reform Proposals

Post Investigations

BLOG STRATEGY, EDITING

As washingtonpost.com's projects/investigative editor, I work closely with the newspaper's investigative unit. My role is to elevate the Post's special projects online, but also to build an audience for our journalism through the Post Investigations blog. Since assuming this role in June, I have completely overhauled the blog, implementing a redesign, encouraging smart aggregation and timely contributions by Post reporters, and expanding our reach through social networking.

• Find Post Investigations: Facebook | Twitter | Scribd | GoogleReader

Vote Monitor 2008

CROWD-SOURCING

With less than two weeks left before the presidential election, expectations of record turnout and mounting concerns over voter fraud presaged a potential Election Day disaster. I imagined a way for Post Investigations to weigh in from an accountability standpoint, and went to work. The result was Vote Monitor 2008, a user-generated data map driven by a few key questions about our reader's voting experience. If voting machine issues became a headline story, we wanted to see it represented on our map. We packaged reader submissions with our own aggregated news coverage to provide context to Election Day issues, which in the end were not widespread.

Inside Bet

SPECIAL REPORT

As a project editor at washingtonpost.com, I am responsible for managing the vision, execution and promotion of special reports. This entails overall project management skills, but also the ability to create web-only content through research, reporting and editing. For Inside Bet, an investigation into the two biggest cheating scandals in the history of online poker, I gathered and edited audio for an interactive explaining the cheating and edited online-only graphics and primers. The resulting package was both authoritative and creative, and made the story accessible to a general audience.

5.5 Seconds: The DeOnté Rawlings Shooting

SPECIAL REPORT

On Sept. 17, 2007, off-duty police officer James Haskel fatally shot 14-year-old DeOnté Rawlings after a search for a stolen minibike escalated into a deadly confrontation. A year after the shooting, federal prosecutors and police officials cleared Haskel, declaring the shooting justified. But a review of case documents by The Post's Cheryl Thompson exposed key questions left unanswered by the official probe. Our online presentation included an interactive reconstruction of the shooting, which was the first time we used panoramas to illustrate a chronology within a single interface.

The Generals' Insurgency

SPECIAL REPORT

Just over two years after President Bush ordered the deployment of nearly 50,000 additional U.S. forces to Iraq, military correspondent Tom Ricks examined the surge's execution and impact in "The Gamble." In this special report, Ricks reports on the evolution of the U.S. military's unorthodox counterinsurgency doctrine as a key component of the surge. Highlights of the online presenation included one U.S. Army captain's thoughts on reconciling with the enemy, as well as an interactive timeline of the war.

The Bush-Cheney Legacy

SPECIAL REPORT

As George W. Bush prepared to relinquish power to Barack Obama, a washingtonpost.com retrospective featured a roundtable discussion of the Bush years. The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson led Bob Woodward and Barton Gellman in a discussion of the Bush legacy that spanned the Iraq war, the adminstration's torture policy and the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. A quickfire video also offered a closer look at Dick Cheney's controversial role as vice president.

Iraq Coverage

WORLD NEWS

The Washington Post's investment in its coverage of U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is affirmed by online readers -- it is the most popular content within washingtonpost.com's world section. As world editor, I expanded the section to coordinate the launch of regular "Washington at War" chats with Post reporters, the debut of a daily podcast filed from the Baghdad bureau, and the creation of widgets that allow readers to track Iraq casualties and Washington Post coverage of the latest shift in U.S. strategy. I also managed the redesign of the section.

• Additional Projects: Bob Woodward's "The War Within", Rick Atkinson's "Left of Boom"

Virginia Tech Shootings

BREAKING NEWS, REPORTING

The Virginia Tech massacre is the kind of story that mobilizes a newsroom -- everyone stops what they are doing to pitch in. I went to Blacksburg, Va., on April 16, 2007, to file dispatches and photos (including the one at left) for washingtonpost.com's blog coverage of the event. I gained early access to one of the dorms, where 19-year-old Laura Mandeville spoke of her missing friend and shared university e-mails sent across campus that day.

• 'A Gunman Is Loose on Campus'
• Hokies Bounce Back

Tragedy in Darfur

SPECIAL REPORT

This interactive report is an example of what can be achieved through close print-online collaboration. I worked with editors in both newsrooms to create an evergreen report on the Darfur crisis that would incorporate Washington Post articles and infographics, video reports from videographer Travis Fox, a narrated slideshow, and an interactive map and timeline. The result is a comprehensive, compelling report.

• The Darfur Tragedy
• Crisis Expands

Israeli-Lebanon War

BREAKING NEWS, EDITING

I led washingtonpost.com's coverage of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah militants by coordinating the creation of an interactive report that would track the daily developments of the war utilizing all available media. It was one of the first of its kind to be developed in a breaking news situation on washingtonpost.com. The feature incorporated at-a-glance developments, photos, video, backgrounders and Washington Post reporting all in a single interface.

• Interactive: Israeli-Lebanon War

Hurricane Rita

REPORTING

Less than a month after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, another hurricane churned toward the Gulf Coast. I was in Houston visiting family when Hurricane Rita appeared on U.S. radars. I volunteered to stay to report on the storm. Following are a selection of audio reports I filed from the region, which were promoted on washingtonpost.com's homepage, throughout related Washington Post articles and within an interactive report on the hurricane's aftermath.

• Audio: Calm Before the Storm (Sept. 23, 2005)
• Audio: Rita's Destruction (Sept. 24, 2005)
• Audio: Rescuers Stand Ready (Sept. 24, 2005)

Moments in Time

PHOTOGRAPHY

Whether I'm cooking, hiking, on the road or hanging out with friends and family, I usually have my camera with me. Photography is a creative outlet for me. View a selection of my photos on Flickr:

• People | Places | Nature | Events

OTHER CLIPS